Theatre
Kafka's Dick (Royal Court)
Bennett's Kafka
Kathy O'Shaughnessy
Posthumous fame is something of a liability. In the wake of the funeral come biographies, the dead man's life is scruti- nised with scant ceremony and no respect. Alan Bennett's play is a meditation on biography, but with a difference; for Kafka famously requested not to be immortalised by his art. Max Brod published Kafka's writings after his death against his wishes.
Here we have the germ of Bennett's play. Kafka, who wrote about the anonymous K, lost anonymity forever, and with him dragged an attendant cast into the spotlight (Brod, parents). In Kafka's Dick Kafka, Brod and Kafka's parents magically appear in a present-day, suburban sitting-room, and this illogical theatrical presence is in itself a metaphor for fame. After all, the famous live on in people's minds and certainly in people's books (15,000 at least have been written on Kafka).
The inhabitants of this sitting-room are Sydney (Geoffrey Palmer) and Linda (Ali- son Steadman). Sydney is an insurance man who swots up biographies and who makes ineffably dreary observations about Kafka. He thinks he is an elevated charac- ter for having such 'literary' inclinations. Meanwhile, Linda is bored with her chau- vinist husband. Then, lo, in walks Max Brod, followed by Kafka. The aspiring Sydney greets them as if they are old friends, for he knows all about them from books. He even knows Kafka's eating habits.
What follows is highly comic. Kafka is still unaware that he is famous and that Max betrayed him. Brod does not dare tell him. They try and hide the books on Kafka from Kafka, but suspicious things happen — as when Kafka ruminates, 'I remember I once said, "A book should be like an axe to break up the frozen seas within us" ': with absentminded, proprietorial ease Brod joins in to finish the quotation. Kafka the institution is public property, and Brod is its guardian.
Brilliantly, Bennett has constructed a situation where the posthumously famous man experiences the outrageous circum- stance of finding himself claimed by others, known by others. Kafka is irritated by Sydney (who is hideously knowledgeable about him), and prefers the intuitive, unbookish Linda. This annoys Sydney. 'I read his books and this is the thanks I get,' he mutters. 'It's no more thanks than I get and I practically wrote them,' argues Brod without irony.
Amid all the comedy is the figure of Sydney's senile father (Charles Lamb). He walks in and out, saying that somebody has been telling lies about him, and generally provides a spectacle of paranoia and mis- understanding that counterpoints the com- ic action — a bit too obviously.
In the second half Kafka's monster of a father turns up (the brilliant Jim Broad- bent). Hermann Kafka wants to convince everybody that his son has misrepresented him to the world, and he bullies his shrinking son to be put 'on trial', Bennett has taken the metaphor of the trial from Kafka's writing and sprinkled it liberally over his play.
In the cunningly makeshift dock (a walking frame behind the sofa) Kafka defends himself. The trial ends when he describes the way in which he would like his work to be known, a marvellous mo- ment in the play. Unknowingly, and with great lyricism, he describes communist Prague: he would like to be read `by untouchables, furnacemen, sweepers of roads. Furtively, with discretion and be- hind locked doors. . . where I am read but not read, known but not spoken of. . .
Directed by Richard Eyre, the play loses its grip in the second half. Three times it seems about to end. The acting is first-rate, but the players are uneasily obliged to mix cerebral ideas with sit-corn banalities. Alan Bennett has a great talent for the one-liner, and it can get the better of him; misjudg- ments about tone make the comedy miss its target (especially the heaven scene) — as if Bennett has two audiences in mind, and cannot opt decisively for either. Nor does he opt for a characterised drama. Human relations are sketched, but stay unde- veloped and left unresolved. The play loses its pull partly because the audience doesn't care enough. But nor does Bennett: for the sake of a laugh he will reduce his character to a stereoptype (Linda — supposedly intuitive — to a quintessential housewife), or elevate his character to an 'intellectual' (both Linda and Sydney have absurdly clever moments).
At the end it is banal Sydney who becomes the intellectual mouthpiece of the play, at which point I felt Alan Bennett had failed to integrate or fully dramatise his ideas. His characters were saying too much. Linda, finally, wants to learn more about writers, beyond biographical gossip. `There's no need,' says Sydney. `This is England. In England facts like that pass for culture. Gossip is the acceptable face of intellect.' Kafka's Dick presents the paro- chial English with a cartoon Kafka that has nothing to do with the man who died before he was famous. Bennett's Kafka is lugubrious, has a chalk-white face and hunched shoulders, loves being depressed. We already know this popular cartoon of the middle-European genius. Why do wri- ters choose their fictive material from the lives of other writers gone before?
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