Kafka’s existential nightmare becomes a short, sharp physical theatre piece from Lecoq-trained On Your Feet theatre. Everyman banker Josef K is suddenly arrested by mysterious authorities for an unspecified crime, with murky consequences that are as unexpected as they are incomprehensible.
Josef K’s story is a good fit for these five performers who, armed with four silver cardboard squares, easily conjure the seedy warehouses and dank underground chasms of Kafka’s imagination. Their physicality captures K’s stifling emotional environment with an urgency that is at moments pulsating, simply using some innovative choreography. Dressed smartly, they encapsulate the bureaucratic terror that awaits K in his quest for answers, with an international cast that creates a cacophony of accents in a maze of existential questions.
Even so, the production occasionally fails in maintaining storytelling power, with a middle section that confuses amongst various multi-rolling and movement that sometimes comes across confused. Without a prior knowledge of the Kafka’s text, you’re likely to get lost, and it’s easy to trouble yourself wondering who is who. But perhaps that’s the point - this is a world where K is consistently lost himself in what’s happening in his own life.