In the Penal Colony

Synopsis

Kafka's terrifying and unforgettable classic retold, Deep in the dungeons of a prisoner camp, a man unaware of his crime is about to be strapped into an elaborate execution device. The Executioner shows no mercy but will The Visitor intervene? After a triumphant run of I Am Yusuf and This is My Brother at the Young Vic last year, director Amir Nizar Zuabi and Palestinian theatre company ShiberHur return with their latest powerful and provocative production direct from touring Palestine.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 15 July 2011

How do you put a machine of death and execution on the stage? Especially one as described in Kafka’s 1919 short story, with its vicious inscriber marking the condemned man’s body with a reminder of his crime; which was, to fall asleep, and not respect his superiors.

The answer is: you don’t, except as a monument with a panel for sur-titles – the text is spoken in Arabic — and a mirror showing decorous streams of blood as the prisoner is pecked by incisors, having been whirred around the stage on a rope like some Middle Eastern equivalent of Beckett’s Lucky in Waiting for Godot.

And this is the problem: the story lacks dramatic momentum but on stage demands it. So the Haifa-based Shiber Hur company provides a small field of sun flowers – freedom, love, escape – and a large pile of unoccupied chairs, representing absentee spectators.

This is a welcome return for the director Amir Nizar Zuabi, a Young Vi...

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Latest User Review

Man - 19 July 2011:

Completely agree, I expected a lot from this show but found it lack lustre and obvious. One of the points of Kafka, or so I thought, comes from the menace of the unseen. The fact that here the all mighty killing machine resembles a large pizza oven doesnt help affairs....

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