Kafka

Franz Kafka – even more than James Joyce – is still the presiding genius of experimental storytelling in the West. A hundred years on from his terrible death at the age of just 40, Kafka remains the voice of the outsider and the disempowered – struggling between the agony of solitude and the pains of intimacy, isolated in the big city and in the world, whilst never quite forgetting the mordant black humour of existence. Kafka himself presented an actor friend of his in Prague in a series of theatrical one man shows. Inspired by this knowledge, multi-award-winning writer and performer Jack Klaff created his internationally acclaimed solo evocation of Kafka’s life, works and times. Featuring a tremendous array of indelible characters from Kafka’s unmatchable imagination, drawing on all of Kafka’s works including Metamorphosis, The Trial, Amerika, The Castle, and his letters, diaries, and fragments, Jack Klaff also impersonates a star-studded cast of Kafka’s friends, lovers, fans and commentators, including – amongst many others – Alan Bennett, Bertolt Brecht, Max Brod, Albert Camus, Anthony Perkins, Orson Welles, Melvyn Bragg, Ben E King, Harold Pinter, David Baddiel, Samuel Beckett, and Albert Einstein. And the many Kafka ‘scholars and intellectuals’ whose pomposity and pretension are satirised without mercy. In 75 minutes within an empty space, this bracing, off-kilter, always-surprising show recreates the life, work and times of a unique human being with a unique mind. Standing ‘head outwards on this spinning planet’. Just like everyone else. Like all of us.Franz Kafka died in June 1924, one hundred years ago.