AFTER The Insurance Man Bennett continues on the Kafka trail with this dazzling entertainment about the Prague novelist, his penis, and literary fame. Once again Richard Eyre is Bennett's director. Literary fame is defined, by the way, as being known even by people who haven't read your books. This is foremost a comedy, of course, with the author exploiting his unfailing ear for middle-class domestic banality and that famous, honed sense of the ridiculous. It must be said that Steven Berkoffs nasty insult to Bennett (he chastised him for taking the name of Kafka in vain) appears doubly foolish since his play lobs question marks at the nature of biography and literary criticism without ever intending or doing violence towards Kafka's stature as an author.
The play opens with a dreaming Kafka in conversation with Max Brod, friend, fellow novelist and his biographer -- the man who ignored Kafka's wish to have all his manuscripts burnt. Brod reminds him that when the Nazis come to power they will burn the books anyway, assuring him immortality; in fact he's surprised the publishers hadn't thought of book burning first. Brod has a nice line in Jewish humour. In a momentary transformation (William Dudley's set is a marvel of ingenuity) we are time-warped into the black and white suburban sitting room of an insurance man, Sydney (Geoffrey Palmer), and his wife Linda (AlisonSteadman). Sydney is writing an article on Kafka for the journal of insurance, Small Print. The door bell rings and Max Brad himself appears. Dumbfounded, Sydney becomes positively ecstatic when the tortoise in the kitchen metamorphoses into Kafka himself. A life-long hero in his own lounge. Kafka is unaware that he is a leading literary figure of the century, so Brod implores Sydney to conceal his detailed knowledge of the author. A farcical attempt to hide all the Kafka publications in the house fails and Kafka realises his posthumous fame.
Here the myth of Kafka is that he was forced to expend his energies in an insurance office while also having to put up with the opprobrium of his despicable, brutish father. We view art not as a gift but as a transaction, says Bennett. We prefer art to be produced at a price: be it a life of squalor, ill-health or unrecognition. So here the father of the cringing, tubercular Kafka returns to set things aright. Why should he go down as the villain of the piece?Hasn't the injured party exaggerated? He blackmails his son by threatening to reveal the tiny dimension (the sort biographers love) of the object referred to in the play's title. Kafka complies and gingerly confirms that he and his father did in fact get along famously Jim Broadbent "as his father Herman" is a swaggering northerner, gross, uncouth and superbly comic. (He partially repeats a performance he gave in The Government Inspectora while ago at the NT.) The sight of him abusing and dominating Roger Lloyd Pack's gaunt Kafka remains an abiding image: "I read one of your books once -- flat as piss on a plate", he jibes. But even he comes to realise that the only way he is to survive in literary history is by being the bullying father. To be a nice parent is to be forgotten in the land of biography.
Wedged into this crowded meeting of ideas and figures from opposite ends of the century is the story of Sydney and Linda's relationship. Alison Steadman recovers from an early bout of discreet corpsing to give a rewarding performance as the unliterary wife whose ignorance is nurtured by her fact-obsessed husband. She comes in the end to condemn "in a roundly feminist critique" the basis of her marriage, and the disappearance of women in literary history. Her flirting with afka is a release and gives Bennett the opportunity to indulge in literary pastiche: he has Kafka describe in the detailed minutiae of existentialist observation her actions in seductively offering him a chocolate. Andrew Sachs's Brod is garrulous and horny, while Roger Lloyd Pack's Kafka deports himself like a chrysalis that will never burst open: his suited, phthistic frame is accompanied by an aura of personal misery, though Bennett makes it clear that he enjoyed being miserable.
The author's trial, with old grandad's walking frame as a makeshift dock (let's not forget Charles Lamb's truly Kafkaesque attempts to prove himself sane to characters that he thinks all along are health inspectors) ironically confirms the need for biography to make the most of the insignificant detail. And in a final scene in heaven where Kafka's father is God, a whole celebrity-clogged cocktail party nightmare gives Kafka, on waking, pause to reflect that Heaven is hell.
There is so much buzzing in this almost over-dense battery of interleaved scenes and literary gamesmanship that it is all Richard Eyre can do to orchestrate the events coherently on stage. The result is one of surfeit; but at least it is a case of too much of a good thing. The cast is rock-steady and the production remains bright, subtle and at times profound. Certainly after seeing this it will be hard to pick up a Kafka novel without a chuckle first.
Thanks to Maree Wilson for sending this article which appeared in the November, 1986 edition of Plays and Players (UK). Also thanks to Meggie who pointed out that the name of the play is Kafka's Dick. The title of the review is actually Kafka's Duck, but on the previous page and in the Curiosities I did post Kafka's Duck as the name of the play. I made the correction -- no censorship intended.