Franz Kafka's The Trial: Four Stage Adaptions (review)

This interesting study looks at four adaptations of Kafka's famous novel. They come from France, Britain, Germany/Sweden, and Canada, and they span the period from 1947 to 1985, an almost forty-year period of political and ideological change in Western culture not to mention the mutations in theatre trends. As the author works out in detail, these aspects play an important role in how four different playwrights put The Trial on the stage and in some cases why they tackled the seemingly thankless task of doing so. Thankless, for usually critics of adaptations of famous works seem unable to resist the temptation to take the easy route of lamenting the audacity of reworking a modern classic in a different genre while extolling the original, which has already proved its worth. They seem to have trouble accepting the adaptations as separate entities, as works of art in their own right, a status Malone argues for in his introductory chapter. The adaptations he has chosen are Le Procès by André Gide and Jean-Louis Barrault; Steven Berkoff's The Trial; Der Prozeß by Peter Weiß; and Sally Clark's The Trial of Judith K. As Malone admits, at least one other version, a Czech one, had to be left out – a pity, since it would have provided an interpretation by a member of the cultural surrounding in which Kafka had lived, albeit in another era, and might have offered a view of totalitarianism different from that of Gide/Barrault. In the 1950 translation of the French version I recently found an interesting note: "This adaptation by Jacqueline and Frank Sundstrom was first performed at the Pasadena Playhouse, California, December 7th, 1949, under the direction of Frank Sundstrom, who played the part of K." Here is apparently an adaptation of an adaptation, which along with the performance might have provided yet another perspective. And then, too, one more adaptation might have deserved mention: The Scapegoat, by John Matthews, which was produced by Piscator's Dramatic Workshop and performed in the President Theatre, New York, on 19 April 1950.

Using observations Roger Mirza has made on adaptation of prose works for the stage as a guide, Malone dissects the transition from one genre to the other, following the same basic pattern with each of the four Trials, give or take particularities of one or the other that merit individual attention (the input of Gide versus Barrault, for example, or Sally Clark's efforts generally to gain recognition in the male dominated world of Canadian theatre). He begins with the adapter's background and the genesis of the adaptation, followed by a scene-to-scene comparison with Kafka's novel – with references to the other adaptations – and finishes with the critics' reception of the plays. It is here that the author shows his diligence in researching his subject. He has assiduously collected a wealth of comment, although the large number of critics' one-liners in his text sometimes threatens to make one lose sight of the forest for the trees. There is sporadic mention of the visual material Malone must have encountered during his extensive research. Plans of the sets, drawings, or photos might have aided in bringing the productions back to life a bit more vividly than words alone, but very likey the publisher would have balked at the increased cost of publishing them. Yet if enough of them still exist, they would perhaps be worth gathering and preserving for posterity in another future publication – certainly more than just a scholarly coffee-table book.

Gide/Barrault were the first to face the problem of externalizing a novel that takes place inside the mind. Fresh from the horrors of Nazi occupation and the Holocaust and from the (often summary) postwar trials of collaborators, which also touched Barrault, they also "had to navigate around a resurgent conservatism that expressed its fears of being overwhelmed by middle-European (i.e. Jewish) literature...