ARCHIVES 2010 / Der Prozess

"So when he read the first chapter of The Trial to his friends - I was one of them - all of us started to laugh hysterically and he himself laughed so hard that at one point, he couldn't continue his reading." That is how Max Brod related the first reading by Kafka of his text The Trial. For the theatre adaptation of this mythic text, Andreas Kriegenburg recalled this story and also remembered the interest Kafka had in the silent cinema, which was just appearing at the time. Built around eight characters each representing one aspect of the diffracted personality of the hero Joseph K., his show is a dive into the brain of this man faced with an inextricable situation, "accused" but left "free" in his movements. This initial paradox carries him to all the possible hypotheses, all the suppositions, all the attempts at an explanation. Unsuccessfully as each possible answer, each imaginable solution, leads him to a new questioning. By making all the protagonists clones of K., themselves also taken into a universe that swings between state oppression and neurotic depression, the director preserves the ambiguity itself of the novel, which brings us closer to the humanity of K., our brother, and at the same time holds us at a distance and leaves us as spectators of his adventures. Faced with a moving and particularly effective stage device, permitting us to very strongly feel the permanent imbalance of the characters who inhabit Kafka's universe, we laugh at their fall, we laugh at their oddness, we enjoy this comic repetition in the style of Buster Keaton. Very finely drawn, like the sketches done by Kafka himself, the silhouettes inhabited by the actors move in an elegant choreography, creating a genuine language of space and of the body. A poetic language made up of humour and anxiety-provoking craziness, the language of a Kafka beyond any caricature. Here, there is no doubt possible, K. resembles us and we resemble K. JFP