An exploration of Franz Kafka’s paternally induced anxieties
Based on Franz Kafka’s famous Letter to His Father, award-winning Canadian director and producer Alon Nashman turns in a deeply moving and credible interpretation of the Czech writer's turbulent relationship with his father Hermann. The sparse set, featuring hundreds of black feathers, various metal cages and a single white feather, almost needs no explanation.
Dominated by his highly opinionated and narcissistic father, Kafka feels constantly defective and inferior, disgraced and ashamed – a feeling that's only emphasised when undressing in a cabana at the sight of his father's superior physicality. Meal times are of particular conflict, during which Hermann lectures the family on proper behaviour and manners that never apply to him, as he quickly and noisily devours his food in larger than life mouthfuls.
© Ruth Corney
Although Kafka succeeds academically, he is repeatedly told he is unfit for life and simply assumes he will fail. Nashman movingly depicts the writer's slow descent into numbness and indecision, broken and enslaved by his father's sarcasm and hypocrisy. He struggles to break free of the mental bullying.
Kafka’s constant dilemma is how to free himself from his father and how his father can be free of him. He tries to flee his father, the family business (where Hermann verbally abuses and refers to staff as “paid enemies”), his home, his engagement to several women and even his Judaism and writing.
© Cylla von Tiedemann
As the author's health and anxieties deteriorate, he has one positive and loving recollection of his father waving to him from the door as he lies ill in bed. Left in an eternal existential vacuum, he chooses nothing and in death appears as an angel able to fly, finally, away from everything.
If you know nothing of Kafka’s brief 40 years on earth, Nashman will leave you with greater clarity into one of the most troubled, respected and referenced writers of the 20th century.
By Mark Bloom
Kafka and Son runs until Sunday 14 August. 10.20am. £12.50, £11 concs. Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, EH8 9TJ. edfringe.com