‘I normally have my breakfast at 8.30 – something’s wrong.’ Too bloody right something’s wrong. I’ve just been ushered into a pitch-black vault by a chalk-faced, glassy eyed, black-suited gentleman, blindfolded and left to fend for myself as strange, hissing creatures brush against my legs. The blindfold is whipped off and I, along with the rest of the scattered audience, wake up to Josef K’s living nightmare, in which an unexpected court summons disrupts his breakfast routine and upends his life. This is the world of Kafka’s The Trial, brought slithering onto the Southwark stage with real menace by Belt Up Theatre Company. 

The Southwark vaults – echoing, endless and with myriad hidden spaces – are a useful location for this claustrophobic tale, and Belt Up Theatre Company use the space well. The scenes melt in and out of the cavernous vault, lit up momentarily by torches, candles, strobe lighting and glinting, frightened eyes. It soon starts to feel like the (exceptionally dark) darkness is concealing endless, startling possibilities.

These vanishing scenes – illuminated one minute, only to disappear the next – chime excellently with the original novel. They encourage us to question our senses and, in doing so, to emphasize with Josef K’s case.  Did I really just see that? Am I starting to hear things? Am I, in fact, going a little bit bonkers? These are the same questions Josef K asks himself, as endures Kafka’s baffling and battering trial. 

Belt Up Theatre Company is careful to maintain and manipulate this connection between the protagonist and his spectators– indeed, generating this kind of sensual empathy between the actors and audience is clearly one of this company’s real strengths. The ensemble cast work carefully, cleverly to continually blur the line between stage and spectator. So, elfin figures scamper restlessly through the audience, cackling and prodding at us as they go. One minute, they’re too close for comfort and the next minute, they’re gone. It is unsettling, dislodging and disorientating – much like Josef’s K’s experience, as he is bashed around by conflicting advice, malicious court-judges and a slew of false leads.

The moments that get closest to Kafka’s original novel – the scenes that really soar - are the ones without words. Whilst these imaginings might be far removed from Kafka’s text, they are set deep inside his world and find much of his enveloping fear and spiralling frustration. The scenes in which Josef K meets the ‘advocate’ – a man who promises his clients freedom but really just extends their misery – are particularly well conceived. The advocate sits somewhere in the sprawling distance, with what looks like a sinking, smoking graveyard hovering between himself and Josef K. He looks a lifetime, a galaxy away. It is a striking, scary and slightly magical image. It is also an insightful one, which underlines the utter hopelessness of Josef K’s case; the impossible and threatening distance that lies between Josef, his advocate and his acquittal. 

Other scenes pack a visual and thematic punch too. At one point, questioning a court official about his case, Josef K is shown a flash of horrors to come. Lit up by strobe lighting, the fate of similar defendants is revealed for an instant: a wooden frame flashes out of the darkness, from which two skeletal girls swing against a great, black nothing. Another flash and the ghostly girls disappear. Again, with the audience hovering only metres behind Josef K (although always, for some reason, keeping a respectful distance), this horrific flash from the future jolts through Josef K and his spectators with equal force. 

These startling scenes are from the show’s opening half and, unfortunately, this volatile, dangerous atmosphere starts to dissipate after a while. Belt Up run out of ways to shake things up and the audience, inevitably, finds its comfort zone. Much of the tension melts away.

The tension is also weakened by an increasing amount of dialogue, as the piece gradually becomes less about evocation and more about explanation. The extended narrative calms things down significantly: everything starts to feel familiar and the potential for surprise is mitigated. The other problem is that Kafka’s words flounder out of context and the dialogue starts to droop. His narrative is a cumulative one – Kafka’s text was not made to stand-alone – and without the throbbing, claustrophobic effect of the surrounding text, his words lose much of their impact. 

This aspect of Kafka’s text – the fact it functions only as a complete and self-contained whole – makes it peculiarly tough to translate or adapt. The meaning is so bound up in the structure and the structure so vital to recreating Kafka’s take on reality, that any adaptation, which plays around with the text, is bound to suffer. This is why the best adaptations often say to hell with the narrative and set about invoking the pervasive mood of Kafka’s world instead. Belt Up Theatre might lose the thread at moments, but they’ve weaved together a genuinely unsettling piece here, which goes some way to recreating the menacing hopelessness of Kafka’s Trial. 

Till 28 November 2009