«Someone must have slandered me, because, without having done anything wrong, one morning I was arrested. Frau Grubach’s cook, my landlady, who brought me breakfast every day at about eight o’clock, had not appeared. It was the first time something like this had happened. I waited a while longer. Shortly after, a man I had never seen before entered my room. With these words begins ‘The process’, the function that opens today at the Teatro María Guerrero -within the program of the National Drama Center-, with adaptation and direction of Ernest Knight. It hardly differs from those that make up the beginning of the novel by Franz Kafka. It differs, fundamentally, in the narrator; the Czech writer told the story of Josef K. in the third person and Caballero has preferred that the protagonist himself be the one to tell it.
‘The process’ is one of the great novels of 20th century literature. When Franz Kafka died in 1924, when he was barely 40 years old, he left an unfinished manuscript that his editor and friend Max Brod published the following year. It tells the unsettling story of Josef K. -“a transcript of the author himself”, explains Caballero”-, a bank manager who one morning receives a visit, in the boarding house where he lives, of two officials who tell him that it has just opened a judicial procedure whose cause is unknown, and which must be presented immediately in court to clarify their situation. From that moment on, K.’s life will be caught up in an absurd and endless process that, as one of the members of the court indicates, includes the defendant’s own conviction. “It is an eternal return in a fable that never ends,” says Ernesto Caballero.
Eight actors make up the cast of ‘El proceso’. Carlos Hipolito embodies the protagonist, Josef K. He is accompanied by Felipe Ansola (student, whipper, manufacturer), Olivia Baglivi (Mrs Bürstner, Leni, Girl Titorelli 1), Jorge Basanta (Willem, Huld), Alberto Jimenez (Franz, the painter Titorelli, the prison chaplain), Paco Ochoa (Investigating Judge, Tall Man, Uncle Albert, Block), Ainhoa Santamaria (Mrs. Grubach, woman from the court, Girl Titorelli 2) and Juan Carlos Talavera (inspector, usher, head of department). The scenery, costumes and lighting are signed, respectively, by Monica Boromello, Anna Tusell and Paco Ariza. The show also includes original music by Jose Maria Sanchez-Verduwhich becomes almost stage design, in the words of Caballero, who defines his staging as “poetic, essentialist and dynamic, with constant action”.
«’The process’ is one of the great classics of our time -says Ernesto Caballero-; its expansive field is very wide, and the particular anecdote, the bureaucratic-administrative labyrinth in which the protagonist finds himself involved, is actually a metaphor for the human conditionof a world that the gods seem to have ignored.
The director places the work on two planes: the first is “that of worldly, devastating law, which leads to legal uncertainty. And in it totalitarianism is born; The work warns us of this, that a weak legal system leads to totalitarianism and therefore to the crushing of the human being. The legal uncertainty it is the expression of a system, he adds, “that does not allow us to be left out, that even asks us to collaborate. Josef K., the ‘hero’, is a doll of fate but he is not passive; he helps determine his fate. He could have ignored it, but he is carving his own future ». ‘The process’, he insists, speaks of our being both “victims and agents of a system that is ultimately self-destructive.”
Ernesto Caballero completes his reading of the work and says that there is also in it «an otherworldly, philosophical and even theological law. This impossibility of accessing a higher law has to do with our blindness with respect to the mystery, to the transcendent. And he describes the work as “enigmatic”, in the wake of others such as ‘Waiting for Godot’, of Bertolt Brecht.
Jorge Basanta and Alberto Jimenez; Paco Ochoa and Olivia Baglivi;: Ainhoa Santamaría
‘The process’ has been made into a movie on several occasions; Orson Welles directed the most outstanding adaptation in 1962 -he even changed the ending-, with Anthony Perkins as Joseph K. There are also numerous conversions to the theater; but not only of this work, but of other titles by the Czech author, such as ‘The metamorphosis’ -the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov made his acting debut in a version of this play which he directed on Broadway Steven Berkoff– or ‘Report to an Academy’. «In any story by Kafka -says Ernesto Caballero- we see characters that seem thrown onto a stage. They are characters that have no background, that are not closed, and that allows many suggestions to the actor who plays them; induces to complete them. They have something, he concludes, of Calderonians, because their worst crime is being born. They are all active, they want to know, and they are moved by an internal character that is guilt.