Members of the cast of The Trial have requested I be discreet about some of the finer details of the play. They want to cling onto the element of surprise for the final performance this evening. Suffice it to say, then, that Alex Wright’s production of Stephen Berkoff’s adaptation of the Franz Kafkas novel begins before the beginning. The first ten minutes of the ‘experience’ – some would say ‘ordeal’; in any case, the word ‘play’ just doesn’t cut it – involved a certain degree of sensory deprivation, a distressing lack of seating and the unnerving sensation of being variously manhandled by purring, dubiously-androgynous bodies.

The play commenced. The audience are expected to be more interactive than usual, not after the example of a cringing pantomime, but inasmuch as we were standing for the entire first half, following the action around the Barn, being pushed, prodded, shuffled and rearranged according to whim of the white-faced, white-gloved cast. By manipulating the audience in this way – effectively employing us as prop-walls – the cast were able to create the impression of a completely new location with every scene-change. This arrangement complemented the dramatic style of The Trial, the nature of which is to disorient. In the second half we were seated, but I in particular underwent no lesser degree of molestation from often-unoccupied members of the cast (all but one of whom served as plain-clothed factota in multiple roles), being treated at one point to a shoulder massage, and spending much of the time peering over the shoulder of a pretty, bestockinged actress who repeatedly mistook my knee for a chair.

James Duckworth gave an exquisite performance as Josef Kay, the starchy nine-to-five banker, replete with all the accessories of that type: he wore a well-tailored but uninspiring three-piece suit, as well as a sober manner and fixed countenance. He also exhibited a somewhat repressed sexuality, manifested in the infrequent references to Elsa, his girlfriend-occasional, and in sudden and uncharacteristic bursts of philandering which were preceded, on every occasion, by an apparent lack of interest in the woman in question and followed by expressions of mild embarrassment.

Kay’s predicament was unsettling, both for him and for the audience. Unspecified charges are levelled at him by people who are conspicuously not police, in circumstances that are utterly mysterious. The drama draws its energy from that very modernist dislocation. The protagonist is just like us: he does not know what he is accused of, and neither do we; but we, like Kay, get the distinct impression that everyone else on stage knows what we do not. All the mime-faced humourists and all the characters they represent are comfortable with the internal logic of the play; only Kay is left in ignorance.
The most obvious interpretation involves religion. Born into sin, a person is guilty from the outset and, since one is prone to lapse even after being acquitted, may certainly be tried twice for the same crime. This pivotal theme is introduced subtly, and comparisons, if wished for, could be drawn between Kay and mankind, between Kay’s menacing lawyer and a priest (both jealously entrap their clients by persuading them that they have a problem that needs professional help) and, most clearly, between a legal trial and a divine judgment.

A religious reading can be inferred cleanly from the legal motifs, but the allusions became more blunt towards the end of the second half, the language more biblical. As always, clumsy symbolism gives little satisfaction. The magnificence of this production rested on seamless, sometimes hilarious and relentlessly inventive performances by the entire cast without exception, and on the mood of psychological disturbance created by the technical control of lighting (sometimes eerie, sometimes stark, always changing) and sound (circular piano music and apocalyptic voiceovers). Roland Barthes, in his account of the trial of Dominici, a farmer sentenced by the French courts for allegedly murdering trespassers, best explains the dramatic tension of The Trial: ‘Whatever the degree of guilt of the accused, there was also the spectacle of a terror which threatens us all, that of being judged by a power which wants only to hear the language it lends us.’