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The Other Press

December 6, 1985 page 11

 

 

    

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People don’t think very much.
People don’t like to think. It’s much
easier to let someone else think for
you. It’s safer too.

So it’s refreshing to run up against
a play that makes you think. Tamah-
nous Theatre’s production of Sally
Clark’s transformation of Franz
Kafka’s The Trial is a play that makes
you think.(There! I’ll be that sentence
made you think too!)

Is it a good production? The
Vancouver Sun’s Lloyd Dykk didn’t
think so. Lloyd Dykk thinks it was
lacking in dread. He also thinks it was
silly of Sally to make the lead
character into a woman when Kafka

didn’t deal with ‘‘women’s experi-|

ence’ at all.
| think Dykk should have thought
about it some more (I also think the

guy has too many letters in his name -

he looks like a typo).

Kafka’s Orwellian play, which
predates Orwell, follows a faceless
bureaucrat who is suddenly thrust
into a legalistic twilight zone, a
nightmare world in which he_ is
arrested, tried and executed without
ever being told what he is charged
with. Ms. Clark’s twist is to transform
the stodgy, faceless bourgeois banker
Joseph K. into 1985’s moral equiv-
alent, the stuck-up yuppie banker
Judith K. While Kafka’s original
version would still be very relevant in
his native Czechoslavakia, Clark
throws her play none to gently beside
False Creek.

In the process, Clark scuttles the

Brown,
Gabriel, -
johnson, ean
& Oates, 3 r

  
  
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
   
 
  
  

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dread which permeates Kafka, but so
what? The Canadian Legal System is
characterized much more by a sense
of bumbling, slow-moving stupidity,
kind of like being run over by a fifteen
ton snail (oops - make that a fifteen
metric - ton snail). | myself know
several people who have found them-

 

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much in evidence in Clark’s version.
And that, Mr. Dykk is the central
tragedy of the ‘‘women’s experience’
of impersonal oppression in the form
of lower salaries for women profes-
sionals, sneering at ‘‘women’s jobs’’,
“women’s roles’’, and ‘’women’s
values’’, of the intellectual rape of ‘’a
women’s place is in the home’ or the
physical rape of ‘‘she wants it; she’s
asking for it; she doesn’t really mean
no’. Judith K. is doubly helpless,
doubly powerless, doubly the victim,
because she is a woman.

She is not a very likeable woman.
She is a materialistic, frigid, grasper,
who only cares about people when
they are of use to her, doesn’t make
“idle chit - chat’’, and as a result has
no friends and never knows what is
really going on around her. She was
married, once-her husband, who was
gay, left her; everyone knew but her.
Under the circumstances it is more
than understandable that everyone
knows about her case but her.
She is a self important, snobbish fool.
| By her manner and her obliviousness,
she blows any chance she has.

Just as in Kafka, our sympathy for
the protagonist is tempered by our
dislike of him/her, and we can’t help
selves enmeshed in the legal system but feel, in spite of the horror of the
in situations, if not as fatal as Judith situation, that they got what they
K’s, then equally as infuriating and deserved.
unjust. The Trial inspires a very strange

The other main theme in Kafka is mix of emotions. It is very disturbing.

the feeling of helplessness in the face It makes you think. And | like that.

of anonymous, impersonal, and totally
overwhelming forces, and this is very

L145" ONCE
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by Jeremy Bloom

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