If the Romantics had poetry and the Victorians had lengthy novels, future generations may well associate our age with biography. With everyone pressed for time these days, reading 'the biography' often stands in stead of reading the biographical subject's opus. Then, armed with interesting facts and a passing knowledge of the work, the reader of biography can make small talk on the subject at a party and, hey presto, seem cultured. On the subject of Kafka for example, one need only mention that he had a small penis to appear entertaining and intellectual, as if to say, "Of course I've read Kafka's works. I can talk about those any time. What is more interesting is this..."
This is England, after all; to state that one is an intellectual is tantamount to admitting to an embarrassing disease. Far easier to imply through an assumed air of authority that one can make intellectual conversation, if only one were bothered, but that upon the present occasion it is more adroit to be entertaining. Because everybody knows (especially television producers), it is simply not done to be informative or intellectual without being entertaining at the same time. As Alan Bennett puts it in his play Kafka's Dick, "Gossip is the acceptable face of intellect." Tidbits of information, like the fact that Kafka had a small penis, "pass for culture" in this country.
      The central conceit of Kafka's Dick is that Kafka and his friend / executor Max Brod, turn up at the home of a suburban couple; Sydney, an insurance salesman and his wife, Linda, a nurse. It is late twentieth-century England and Brod and Kafka are, by rights, dead. Kafka is unaware that after his death, Brod did not, as he had promised, burn all of Kafka's letters, manuscripts and published works. As a result, Kafka now has an invite to "that posthumous cocktail party - posterity" as Bennett phrases it. Brod too has an invite because he wrote The biography of Kafka.
      Sydney, an amateur Kafka scholar writing a paper for Small Print: Journal of Insurance Studies, is delighted at the opportunity to quiz his subject personally, but is stopped from doing so by Brod who reasons that if anyone in the present-day were to appear interested in Kafka, then Kafka's works must have remained to posterity, a fact which he is of course trying to hide from Kafka. Just as Brod and Sydney think they might have succeeded in keeping his fame from Kafka, the latter's father, Hermann, walks in threatening to tell the world that his son had a small penis unless Kafka renounces claims that his father abused him. These claims are all that posterity knows of Hermann and he wants to clear his name. Accordingly, Kafka protests his father's innocence. Knowing the truth of the matter, the others put Kafka on trial (punning on the title of one of his best known works) in a scene that is a little laboured by Bennett.
      "Sydney," protests Linda, "this is persecution." "No it's not" her husband answers, "It's biography." It is an exchange that cleverly points out the damage done to the living and the dead by the intrusive nature of biography (witness the Hughes family) and the public craving for a myth of the artist rejected in his or her own time (witness Plath). This message is underlined a little too heavily by the use of Linda's father's walking frame as the box in which Kafka stands trial. It should be noted that this is Bennett's detail rather than a decision of this particular production. Despite points like this being rather laboured, Bennett has produced an elegant comedy with a serious message, that is just as suited to the stage today as it was when it made its first appearance at the Royal Court in 1986. Indeed, with so much talk in the play about the turning of names into adjectives (Kafka-esque, Proustian) one could say Kafka's Dick is positively Stoppardian in its witty conceit, though it goes one up on Stoppard by achieving just as much without the clever-cleverness.
      This production, directed and produced by Alexander Holt upstairs at Highgate pub The Gatehouse, is well worth catching, both for the wit of Bennett's script and the charming lack of cynicism displayed by the actors and production team alike. Edward Gower, as Max Brod, gives the star performance, which is camped up to the perfect pitch during the final scene in Heaven at that "posthumous cocktail party". The cast are strong and work together securely. Moreoever, the design (Anna Calligaro) is economical and effective. Every part of the stage is used naturally and to great effect. The setting is simply one room, a sitting room with two exits, one leading to the rest of the house and one to the garden. The decor has a vague seventies feel but could be the eighties or nineties with its bland grey sofa and lacquered chairs and coffee-table. Similarly, the costumes are of a nondescript period. The style of Jonathan Kemp's Sydney suggests the 'I Love Lucy' and 'Bewitched' hubbies of the American fifties, whereas the blousy style of Gailie Morrison's Linda suggests the very early nineties. Every performance is solid and convincing, though Marc Nielson as Kafka is, by definition of his character, the weak point.
      Above all, there is a sense of enjoyment in the playing of their parts emanating from the tightly-knit cast. Whatever the critical reaction, this is not a play that will suffer from the nit-picking seriousness of the culture industry. Certainly, the lighting is simplistic and naive, as is almost everything about the play, but that is the point. It is a production that is all heart, with nothing to prove, and is therefore perfectly attuned to Bennett's message that the inherent joy of art will always triumph over the ameliorating nature of criticism, and that one can and should delight in intellectual endeavour without having to prove its utility.
Laura Keynes