I didn’t know what to expect. The Barrie Kosky production playing at the Berliner Ensemble was billed as “a Talmudic tingeltangel around Kafka’s Trial, after Kafka, with music from Bach to Schumann to Yiddish vaudeville.” (The untranslatable tingeltangel is an old Berlin dialect term for exactly what it sounds like: the jingly, raucous sound of a turn-of-the-century cabaret.) And I couldn’t imagine who would show up for such a thing, either. I had grabbed a ticket to the Saturday night production, which featured English supertitles, though in the event I didn’t spot any other English-speakers in the audience that night. I suspect the production is too recent, and the tickets too hot, to have seeped beyond any but local ticket-buyers yet.
As the curtain rose, we began with a scrim on which words appeared one by one in an old-fashioned typewriter font. I recognized them as coming from Kafka’s story “The Hunger Artist”—the first of several snippets from this sad, sardonic, ironic tale of a man who slowly starves himself to death even after his audience has lost interest. I was to recognize other well-known bits of Kafka’s writing as they surfaced throughout the show—centrally from The Trial, which formed the backbone of the plot, but also from stories like “The Judgment” and “In the Penal Colony,” from the parable “Before the Law,” and from some late notebook entries detailing his final months at the TB sanatorium. Even “Metamorphosis” surfaced briefly, not explicitly but subliminally in the insect-exterminating outfit of one of the characters, whose poison-filled cannister was emblazoned with a cockroach. And there may have been many other references I failed to catch, for this was a production you would have to watch a thousand times to grasp…I was going to say “fully,” but any hold one gains on such material can only be partial at best.
That sense of irresolvability is part of Kafka’s enduring spell, and part of the reason Barrie Kosky—a lifelong Kafka fan—was drawn to this project in the first place. For him, The Trial is not about the obstacles thrown up by an external bureaucracy, but the far more obstinate difficulties produced by the guilt-ridden self. As an Australian Jew long resident in Berlin, with a Hungarian grandmother urging him to learn German on one side and a Polish grandmother tying him to Yiddish culture on the other, Kosky knows this struggle from the inside. He also knows that Kafka himself took time out of his secular German-language life to learn Hebrew and immerse himself in Yiddish theater. Correctly, I think, Kosky perceives the primary force in Kafka’s life and work as a kind of resistance, or ambivalence, or self-division stemming from the conflict between the individual assimilated writer and his culturally religious, shtetl-based, rule-bound background—a conflict that applies to non-Jews as well as Jews, since we’re all subject to the battle between our own personal desires and our obligations to those who surround us and gave rise to us. But Kafka is unique, perhaps, in perceiving his inner divisions in a way that seems to echo an outer reality. What’s more, he is somehow able to render these circumstances in a tone of voice that, on the page as well as on the stage, simultaneously gives rise to both tragedy and wit.
In Kosky’s production, the central character of Josef K.—or simply K., as he is called in the program—is performed by the terrific, nay, the astonishing, the really quite unbelievable Kathrin Wehlisch. She begins and ends in an outfit made up of loose white underwear and a sleeveless white undershirt, and though she acquires at various times an ill-fitting suit, some shoes and socks, and even, finally, a pair of tap shoes, her emotional mode is one of complete nakedness, complete exposure to our eyes and the eyes of those around her onstage. Often she is spotlit alone onstage, and when she moves around—sometimes haltingly, more often frantically—the spotlight follows her, hinting from the very beginning at the analogy between a theatrical cabaret performance and a legal /familial/cultural/psychological sense of persecution. Wehlisch is onstage for every minute of the three-hour performance (except when she, and we, are given a fifteen-minute break), and throughout she is at fever pitch, both physically and emotionally. Though casting a woman in the role might seem to be a statement of sorts, it does not make any sense to suggest that she has been chosen for this reason, since it seems to me that no other actor, of any gender, could have accomplished what she does here.
Wehlisch is supported in her performance by an array of uber-talented Berliner Ensemble actors taking on multiple roles: the shape-shifting Gabriel Schneider, Joyce Sanhá, and Paul Herwig, the scarily tall and bony Constanze Becker, the thrillingly insidious Alexander Simon, the incorrigibly pathetic Martin Rentzch, and—brought in from the Komische Oper—the tender-voiced soprano Alma Sadé, who plays Kafka’s final love interest, Dora Diamant. Wehlisch and her fellow cast members are further supported by the brilliant musical direction, credited to Adam Benzwi, who also conducts the eight-member band, which performs Bach, Schumann, and vaudeville-songs on everything from piano, violin, and drums to clarinet, saxophone, ukulele, and tuba.
The bare bones of the show’s “plot” appear at first to be tied roughly to Kafka’s words. As in the novel, K. is arrested for reasons unknown to him and hauled to prison, then released for reasons equally unknown. After dashing about for a while trying fruitlessly to get to the bottom of his problem, he encounters his Uncle Karl, who takes him to see a powerful lawyer. This oppressive figure never appears in person but instead hides behind a curtained-off area, issuing instructions and commands in a booming voice (shades of The Wizard of Oz). When eventually this curtain is pulled aside, it reveals an Ark from which K. removes the Torah scrolls, and when he unfurls them and begins to read aloud, the words are from the parable “Before the Law,” except that the gatekeeper’s lines have been translated into Hebrew. The Hebrew language reappears when the hidden lawyer’s voice turns into that of the father from “The Judgment,” castigating his son (for whom the trembling K. stands in) and telling him to go drown himself. Later still, K. receives instruction from a cold, severe, judge-like figure, who describes in detail the elaborate torture machine that will inscribe K’s ultimate verdict in bloody Hebrew letters on his back. (Midway through her dry description of this process, the actor Constanze Becker was faintly interrupted by a cough from the audience—at which point, in echt–Berliner Ensemble fashion, she interrupted herself to glare at the cougher in a manner that clearly suggested, “If you don’t shut up, you’ll be next.”) Throughout the show, the only respites K. experiences from these prolonged episodes of anxiety are the intermittent occasions when his lover, Dora Diamant, sings tenderly to him in Yiddish.
Yet this description does not begin to indicate how extremely weird the whole production is. For instance, Dora’s songs are derived in large part from Schumann’s Dichterliebe, with its German lyrics by Heinrich Heine (Kafka’s predecessor, so to speak, as an assimilated Jew), but here translated into Yiddish. This means that in addition to my English-language supertitles, Dora’s songs required German supertitles, so that the local audience could understand the Yiddish words. And that’s not the half of it. At unexpected moments throughout the play’s otherwise upsetting, stress-filled action, the characters would spontaneously burst into animated song and dance, much as they do in Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven or The Singing Detective. But unlike Potter’s understandable lyrics, most of K.‘s songs are in Yiddish, and these too require supertitles, as do all the Hebrew bits delivered from God’s or the father’s mouth. Yet even though the music for the vaudeville bits may sound like early-twentieth-century cabaret, the lyrics seem not to derive from traditional songs, because they apply too closely to the matters at hand—K.’s nerves, for instance, which are celebrated at length in one hilarious song, or the father’s harsh commands, which appear in another. I enjoyed all these musical interludes, but my absolute favorite consisted of three bearded Jews in full Hasidic garb, comically and indeed blasphemously singing and dancing and twirling their tzitzit tassels in celebration of K.’s dire fate.
I don’t think you could get away with putting this on a New York stage, and the fact that I found myself laughing at it in Berlin—surrounded by people who were laughing at it too, and for reasons that I, as a super-secular American Jew, couldn’t begin to fathom—began to make me nervous. But that nervousness was also essential to the production. The effort to produce an underlying discomfort was not the sole aim of Kosky’s K., but it was certainly there in the mix. And as the performance wound down to its close, with the remarkable Wehlisch/K. giving a heartfelt, flamboyant, but ultimately frenetic rendering of “Mayn Yiddishe Meydele”—for once, a traditional song I did recognize—I felt my heart break.