The BBC radio play Kafka the Musical—a show about famous German author Franz Kafka being approached by producers who try to have him star in a musical about himself—is having its world premiere on stage here in Victoria on Friday.
Kafka the Musical writer Murray Gold (also an award-winning playwright and musical director for Doctor Who) says that everything in the play is a joke “placed by a malevolent cosmos,” right down to the musical itself.
“Kafka himself is really dead against a musical in the musical,” says Gold.
In real life, before dying of tuberculosis at 40, Kafka asked his best friend to destroy everything he had ever written. Against Kafka’s dying wish, the friend published all of his works. In the play, Kafka is approached by a producer wanting to turn all that work into a musical starring Kafka as himself.
“That’s what happens when your best friend betrays you,” says Gold. “People will come around in this stupid world we live in, the machine that will come in and convert something—no matter how deep—into something stupid, and shallow,” says Gold.
Without giving away too much, Gold describes the funny, and—as the story progresses, increasingly dark—content of the play.
“There’s sex in it, there’s torture in it, there’s some sort of violence—or implied violence—there’s cross-dressing, there’s some singing, and then there is death,” says Gold. “And love. And kissing.”
Gold hopes that the story of Kafka will leave an impression on people, like being on a drug that alters your perceptions and stays with you after you go back to your normal life.
“Its just good to have a personal experience,” he says. “To me, that’s what literature always was—it was always a bit toxic. It would always infect you in a good way.”
The characters of Kafka the Musical are all characters from Kafka’s own life, each with complex relationships to the protagonist, says director Clayton Jevne.
“It’s so dense,” says Jevne. “The characters are so multi-layered. There’s so many things going on; it’s really multi-dimensional because we capture all of the insights they’ve had.”
Gold says that the main theme of the play is about the meaning of Kafka’s life and how it relates to everyone.
“There is this weird sense that Kafka’s life and death and just the fact that he existed is more important then what he wrote,” says Gold. “There’s this humanistic thing that’s actually at the end of everything—however weird and strange the world is, and however great your ability to express how weird and strange the world is, the thing that really matters is that you live. And whatever you did with your life, that you just lived.”
Kafka the Musical
Until December 15
$12 students/$16 adults
Theatre Inconnu, 1923 Fernwood Road
theatreinconnu.com