THEATRE: David Le Page
KAFKA Dances is not an attempt at dramatic history. That the character Franz Kafka is obviously based on the well-known writer is no more important than that entirely fictional characters may be born of the real experiences of those who create them.
As Australian playwright Timothy Daly writes: “Better to try and explain the workings of people’s hearts than to relate the mere chronology of their stories.” In this respect his play avoids the pitfall into which Antony Akerman recently stumbled with Dark Outsider, about South African poet Roy Campbell.
Daly describes his play as “an unusual romance”. And the play does relate the progress of Kafka’s relationship with Felice Bauer, whom he met just five or six times in five years while exchanging a multitude of letters with her. As large a theme in the play is Kafka’s relationship with his family — his struggles with his parents and his Jewishness. Fortunately, Daly’s handling of the subject is so adept, and the milieu sufficiently unfamiliar, that our experience is never blighted by the thought that this is “yet another Jewish family drama”.
Rather, it is a unique exploration of the peculiar world of Kafka, his interaction with his family and Felice, and the place where they all meet: his dreams. Given his subjects, and the ominous intonations of the word he bequeathed us, “Kafkaesque”, we would not expect Kafka’s subconscious to be a colourful and extravagant place, but one of the delicious surprises of Daly’s play is that the dreaming Kafka enters the rich, vulgar, forthright showiness of Yiddish theatre. There are dark colours to this world, to be sure, but it is not the implacable shadowy labyrinth one might have expected.
In the evenings, Kafka, much to the disgust of his family, attends the Yiddish theatre. We are not exposed to these visits, but join Kafka when he returns to the theatre in his dreams, an event always heralded by a cackling clarinet. And the cast in this realm? Who but the earliest guests to every subconscious, the family. Of course, they are more uninhibited and lively than those he lives with by day. They attempt to teach him how to be an actor.
Because the withdrawn, word-entangled Kafka is attracted to Felice’s liveliness, desiring nothing more than to be a man of action, he sets about learning to “act”, dramatically. Yet he ends up being sucked into “how to act”, how to behave. His dreams betray him; it is when Felice joins his family in the dream theatre that he begins to despair of his real relationship with her.
Kafka is played by Dawid Minnaar, who excels in the role, never losing the awkward bodily tension that captures his character’s anxious persona, only occasionally lapsing into the strange staggered speech rhythms that have marked some of his other roles. When he first meets Felice (Camilla Waldman), hope, delight, apprehension and wonder are mapped on his face in a few marvellous instants.
Waldman, too, is vivacious and unselfconscious. Yael Farber plays Ottla, Kafka’s sister, who counterpoints his rebellion with her own, rather different betrayal of her parents’ mores. Farber is as quick as a whip, charming and funny. Mike Huff and Lyn Hooker are parents with unflagging energy and convincing persistence in never contemplating change, or even noticing the agonies of their son.
The production is a triumph for director Clare Stopford, who has created amazing movements and moments with a command of pace that would seem to have freed every last ounce of the play’s humour and humanity. No less than Kafka in his few joyous moments, this is theatre that dances.
Kafka Dances runs Upstairs at the Market in Johannesburg until March 2