THE CASTLE
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The very qualities that make The Castle a masterpiece of modern fiction–its deceptively simple prose, which conceals more than it reveals, the biting satire that only hints at what is being satirized, Kafka’s paranoiac eye for hidden messages and shades of meaning–are certain to trip up anyone hoping to translate the novel to the stage. How can the would-be adapter hope to capture all the contradictions in Kafka’s work–his despair and his humor, his alienation and his wit, his realist’s eye for detail and his mystic’s taste for allegory? How to cope with the way Kafka allows his story to develop with all of the randomness of real life? This sort of haphazard plot works fine in a novel (sometimes), but can be excruciating on the stage. Most important, how does one construct a play around a character like K.?
Every detail Kafka reveals about K. is open to question: his profession, his reason for coming to the village, his motive for staying. The authorities may have no intention of ever allowing K. to practice his profession. On the other hand, K. may not even be a land surveyor. All of K.’s adventures in the unnamed village overseen by the Castle may be based on a bureaucratic version of “Chicken” in which K. must maintain he is the land surveyor the authorities asked for and the authorities must maintain they were expecting one even though they don’t seem to need him. In fact, Kafka’s novel resembles nothing so much as a newspaper photograph: the more closely one looks at it, the more fuzzy the details become.
This one flaw, however, in no way endangers Richard’s fine production, which manages to bring a difficult work to the stage with intelligence, sensitivity, and plenty of wit and imagination.
