Reaching a higher level

KAFKA DANCES by Timothy Daly

The Wharf
Reviewer: James Waites.

Timothy Daly's play Kafka Dances premiered in 1993 at the Stables Theatre in Kings Cross, so there's an underpinning of triumph in this rhapsody on a literary theme even being invited to play a season at The Wharf.

The play was well-received the first time around. That there are few radical changes - it's the same cast, crew and essentially the same production, I am told - suggests the play underwent some excellent preparation then. Daly's play is not particularly out of the ordinary, except to the extent that a nice dramatic idea has, for once, been thoroughly worked through. It's all of a piece - inventive, pleasurable, and neat - and, unlike so many new Australian plays, the dramaturgical input of director Ros Horin and dramaturg Keith Gallasch has been all for the good.

It's a play that comes from Daly's reading of Kafka's letters to Felice Bauer, the woman to whom he was engaged twice but never married, to whom he wrote many manic, passionate, intelligent letters, but met only half a dozen times.

Thankfully, it's also a play that leaves the world of bizzare fact hunting behind for one closer to spiritual search: it uses fragments of one artist's life story to expostulate on a parcel of themes to do with the struggle by any artist to stick with his or her own emerging version of "the truth".

What's most pleasing about this production is its modest, yet effective, theatricality. Kafka's inner world, for example, is presented as a form of Yiddish dream theatre where the family members, in a spirit of amateurish fun, serve as inner voices, challenging the writer to try and overcome some of his more extreme personal defects. With the prospect of marrying a beautiful woman, he does try to work on those skills deemed necessary for a good performance on the that stage called life, but to little avail, and the dream sequences inevitably take on that idiosyncratic form of private terror for which the great Prague-born writer is renowned.

This is a well cast production, with Ron Falk and Jane Harders, as the Jewish parents, pushing their well-honed thespian skills to a Blackadder edge in the dream sequences, and Anna Broinowski's threateningly dark sister artfully balancing all that is innocent and light in Cate Blanchett's Felice. A 1992 NIDA graduate, Blanchett has already been recognised as an actor of particular promise, and here she gracefully forges her claim further.

But the night goes, as it should, to Lech Mackiewicz's Franz Kafka. This gifted graduate from one of Poland's leading theatre schools shares Kafka's dark European looks, and the nervous stutter and tubercular cough appear easy; but what's really special is the credibility with which Mackiewicz maps out the pain and struggle of an artist attempting to overcome personal shortcomings and a hostile environment to make his or her life's work.

The premise may well be rather old fashioned - artist as misunderstood genius - but in this actor's hands it's been honed down to sculpture, originality, a work of art.

The lights come on in the ever-so-sensitive face of this Kafka every time a new hope dawns, only to be dashed again in the darkness of broken dreams so poetically recorded in Kafka's own work.

Finally, credit must also go to Ros Horin who, as the artistic director of the Griffin Theatre, not only saw the potential of this play, but has since worked it up to the level at which it can enjoy mainstream success.

The Australian, Friday June 17th, 1994.

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Aussie Cate Online © 1999 Lin, Dean, Lance
800x600 screen size recommended.

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