Kafka and Stories of Mental Health
HOW I MET THE GROUP
I am not an expert on the subject of mental health and so all I can
do is tell you about the first project I did with the theatre company
Out of Character, which came out of the Converge programme at
YSJU and is made up of mental health service users. I first came
into contact with them in 2009 when Nick Rowe contacted the
theatre to see what connections might be made that would benefit
the group. I went to meet the group and felt a kind of instant
attraction – here was a group of real individuals, whose only
commonality was the fact that they had all suffered with their
mental health at some point, and, they were all passionate about
theatre. There were also refreshingly honest and lacking in
pretence. After meeting them, I couldn’t get them off my mind and
so we made plans for me to create a piece of theatre with the
company which would perform here in our Studio in July 2010.
TEXT OR DEVISE OR THE BEST OF BOTH?
The big question then, was simply – what kind of show to make?
They had generally been devising their own work based on their
own stories, experiences and thoughts on mental health – but I
didn’t want to just do the same kind of work with them that they
had already been doing, and I didn’t really feel I had sufficient
knowledge of mental health to be devising a play around their
personal stories – I wasn’t an expert. I initially decided that I would
simply find a play that I thought would work and be interesting for
them, but I then could see how difficult some of them found it – at
that time certainly - to learn an “alien” text and embody other
people’s words. So I began to think about how I might combine the
best of both and devise around an existing text or texts. This led
me to start thinking about the work of Franz Kafka. Some years
back I had chanced on some of his short stories and had been
preparing to create a professional show based on these pieces –
which sadly never came to be – but I went back to his writings and
began to read again and I began to see Kafka himself in a whole
new light.
KAFKA
Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 and died of laryngeal
tuberculosis in 1924 – although, more accurately it appears to be
from starvation, as his larynx was swollen to the point that he could
not longer swallow food. He is a world-renowned author, who only
became famous after his death, who’s own peculiar flavour of
writing, has even spawned it’s own name “Kafkaesque” which
derives from this sense of being unhoused, unable to find
accommodation in a mysteriously antagonistic world, and is often
used to describe surreal situations like those in his stories. The
stories that he is most famous for are: The Trial, which deals with
the character of Joseph K a man accused without ever knowing
what for, treated as a criminal without a crime, and
Metamorphosis, where the protagonist awakes to find himself
transformed into a monstrous insect. But the themes of alienation,
guilt, exclusion, self-loathing and self-lacerating pain both
permeate his work and were evident in his own real life. Kafka was
never formally diagnosed with a mental illness, but he was
tormented by private fears and lonely anxieties which crippled his
life. Kafka said himself :
IT IS THROUGH WRITING THAT I KEEP A HOLD ON LIFE.
This seemed to me to resonate strongly with what many of the Out
of Character group and indeed, members of the wider Converge
arts courses, would say was that being involved in the arts was
giving them a grip on themselves - one member even described
the sessions as giving him something to live for. And this idea led
to the show Tales from Kafka.
WHAT ARE THE STORIES ABOUT? KAFKA’S WORK DEFIES
LITERAL TRANSLATIONS
So I started to read through Kafka’s short stories and quickly
jettisoned the longer stories I had originally been drawn to
(Investigations of a Dog and The Judgement) and became more
and more fascinated by some of the more obscure pieces of
writing and fragments of ideas and stories. If you have never read
these, I urge you to take a look, as they make fascinating reading.
They sometimes have the quality of dreams, that have simply been
recorded, and are both bizarre, and yet hold a brilliant and
perceptive mirror up to nature, using unforgettable imagery. I often
hear people talk about Kafka’s stories and they say things like: “oh
yes, The Trial, that’s the one that is an allegory about blah, blah,
blah, and Metamorphosis, that is actually about blah!” (I’ll leave
you to define the blahs.) But Kafka’s work defies easy literal
translations, his stories use highly original symbols that speak to
us on many different levels, and – not unlike fairytales and great
works of art – hold different narratives for different people at
different times. Like our dreams, the stories don’t always make
sense when we attempt to translate them into a linear narrative,
but the key images we remember have impact and resonate with
our own sense of what it means to be human, and our emotional or
spiritual experiences of the world. For example, one story that I
included in the piece we finally made together was simply called
“Unhappiness”, and begins like this:
When it was becoming unbearable – once toward evening in
November – and I ran along the narrow strip of carpet in my
room as on a racetrack, shrank from the sight of the lit-up
street, then turning to the interior of the room found a new
goal in the depths of the looking-glass and screamed aloud,
to hear only my own scream which met no answer nor
anything that could draw its force away, so that it rose up
without check and could not stop even when it ceased being
audible, the door opened toward me…..and like a small ghost
a child blew in from the pitch-dark corridor, and stood a tiptoe on a floor board that quivered imperceptively…
The man proceeds to have a surreal conversation with the ghost,
who reminds him how close she is to his own nature, until finally
he leaves and meets a neighbour and tells him he has a ghost in
his house – which they joke about together and neither of them
quite believe – although the man warns the neighbour not to even
think about stealing his ghost, and then returns forlornly to his
room – trapped even though he would rather have gone out. There
is no straightforward translation of meaning for this story, but the
heart of it seems to lie in what the man says to the neighbour that
being scared of the ghost is only a secondary fear:
The real fear is a fear of what caused the apparition. And that
fear doesn’t go away. I have it fairly powerfully inside me now.
The story could be interpreted in many ways, but the basic image
of a ghost being a manifestation of something inexplicable, to be
feared, which is clearly related and connected to yourself, which
has sprung from your own screaming unhappiness and which
others don’t believe, and even joke about, but which is very real to
you and which keeps you trapped and isolated however much you
want to escape from it, is a pretty powerful analogy for the
experiences of someone suffering with their mental health.
PROCESS AND WHAT THE PLAY NEEDED
So, I began selecting stories and bringing them to the group and
we would read them discuss what we thought they meant, or what
they made us think of, and then we would split into 2 groups and
create a dramatisation of them, highlighting whatever we found
most arresting in the writing, or the things that the actors most
clearly identified with. I began to script some of the stories off the
back of this, but I knew I needed a stronger backbone to the piece
as a collection of stories – some kind of framing device was
needed. Two pieces came to light that helped me do this. The first
was called At Night:
Deeply lost in the night. Just as one sometimes lowers one’s
head to reflect, thus to be utterly lost in the night. All around
people are asleep. It’s just play acting, an innocent selfdeception, that they sleep in houses, in safe beds, under a
safe roof, stretched out or curled on mattresses, in sheets,
under blankets; in reality they have flocked together as they
had once upon a time and again later in a deserted region, a
camp in the open, a countless number of men, an army, a
people, under a cold sky on cold earth, collapsed where once
they had stood, forehead pressed on the arm, face to the
ground, breathing quietly. And you are watching, are one of
the watchmen, you find the next one by brandishing a burning
stick from the brushwood pile beside you. Why are you
watching? Someone must watch, it is said. Someone must be
there.
Whatever Kafka had intended to convey with this story, I can’t say,
I can only tell you what it created for me. I saw the characters from
the other stories as a group of restless, sleepless sleepers, kept
awake by their thoughts and fears, pretending to sleep, whose
stories or possibly dreams or nightmares are what we witness on
stage. They believe they are alone, and are not conscious of the
others around them, who are going through similar things, and are
unaware that the idea that the rest of the world is safe and sound
asleep in their beds while they toss and turn is an illusion. And in
our play, I thought, we would see these restless sleepers flocked
together, each sleeper illuminated by a burning stick – or a theatre
spotlight in more mundane terms - as we hear their story. So this
was the framing device I decided to use.
WHY ARE YOU WATCHING?
But I was also very struck by the line: And you are watching, and
why are you watching? Which I felt as a direct address to us as
an audience. Why are you watching? It seemed to me to hold the
question, why are we so fascinated with madness? And it was a
question I needed to ask myself. Why do we want to watch it so
much – madness is a huge ubiquitous theme in theatre, and there
is barely a play that’s ever been written that doesn’t touch on
mental health in some shape or form. Why do we want to watch?
And why just watch? Why are we content to be passive bystanders
to those in need, instead of involving ourselves in the lives of
others, however messy. It felt like this line needed to be a gentle
provocation to the audience that might come and watch us. And
yet the story concludes with Someone must watch, it is said.
Someone must be there. In some ways I felt the act of witnessing
this company tell these stories, was in itself an important one. A
group of people many of whom had dropped off the edge of
society at points in their lives, whose voices were inaudible in their
community, but who would connect their voices and experiences to
a literary giant, and be listened to, given place and respect.
JOSEPH K
The other piece that I found that helped me create more of a
backbone to the piece was discovering that Kafka’s famous story
The Trial, was not the only time he had written about the character
Joseph K, there is a short story, simply entitled A Dream, which
begins with the words: Joseph K was dreaming. In the dream he
finds himself in a graveyard and discovers an artist engraving a
tombstone with Here Lies Joseph K. he digs down into the earth to
create a great hole and then sinks into it in relief wafted onto his
back by a gentle current. It ends with the words: Enchanted by
the sight, he woke up. I was intrigued that this famous character
had another story attached to him and curious as to what was the
story of this man’s life leading up to this point that he was so
delighted to sink into his own grave – even in his dreams. This
gave me a very clear central character who could be one of the
sleepers and who’s journey might thread through the whole play,
and as I read other fragments, I found several other sections that
seemed to contribute to an interesting narrative for Joseph K,
ending with his final moments in the grave – although of course
that wasn’t really the end of the story, because it says he wakes
up. So was a more positive ending possible?
So I had a framing device and a good narrative backbone in order
to create a play full of stories dealing with themes of guilt,
persecution, loneliness and failure to cope, themes common to
Kafka, common to mental health service users and indeed highly
recognisable to most of us, which the Out of Character actors were
excited and inspired to tell. There is, however, one other less
prominent but still reoccurring theme in Kafka’s work: hope for new
life and a sense of personal remaking. That the play should hold
hope too, was very important, and inspired by the things the actors
had told me about how important the company was and how much
the other people in it meant to them and were a support to them, I
decided to finish the play with the sleepers waking up and noticing
the other sleepers, simply recognising that they were not alone
and finding a comfort and support in that.
So I wrote the play, partly from the work that we had devised
together, partly from my own thoughts and ideas, but all inspired
by the duality of Kafka’s voice and the actors voices. I scripted the
roles with them in mind, and cast them according to the parts I felt
they identified with and were drawn to. I didn’t have huge amounts
of time to get to know them, so I had to work from my gut instinct
as to who would fit best where. I never once asked them about
their past illnesses or diagnoses – I never felt I had the right to ask,
and didn’t want to look at them like a set of pigeon holes. Each had
a unique voice and unique experiences and I tried to cast them
where I felt they fitted in this unique set of stories. Interestingly,
one of the actors after the first night said to me – You had us
sussed. Oh yeah, you had our number alright – I took this to mean
that I had connected most of the group quite well to stories that
they related to, however weird and wonderful they were on the
surface – and some of them were really weird and wonderful like
the one about the man who comes home from work one day to find
two balls independently bouncing in his flat, that won’t go away or
stop bouncing so he has to try to hide or get rid of them. A weird
story, and yet again, without pasting a literal interpretation on to it,
felt quite appropriate to the actor who played him, and was
immediately the part he wanted to play. Quite late in the progress I
tried to do some character work with the cast to help them develop
a stronger sense of who they were, but largely the descriptions of
their character were just versions of themselves – in one or two
cases, even down to their imagined occupation. The actors were
very much connecting and taking themselves into the characters
and fusing their voices and experiences with them, and thereby
telling some of their own story through a piece that had a wider
universal appeal and recognition. Some actors perhaps were more
fitted to do this than others – although, again, I didn’t know it at the
time. Back this last summer we started working on a new version
of the play called More Tales from Kafka – expanded and partially
recast as we have a different company of actors this time. When I
discussed with each of the actors from the original piece, whether
they wanted to play the same parts again – they all said yes with
the exception of one man, who had played a character in the
original version who is crippled by anxiety, self-doubt and lack of
confidence, who says he is “Completely unsure of my footing in
this world, in this town, in my family.” He desperately wants a
relationship but always fails, and is terrified of remaining a
bachelor – very like Kafka himself, who never managed to get the
marriage that he so wanted. This actor kept saying he was happy
to try something different this time – which surprised me as he’d
played it brilliantly first time round and really invested in it. Then of
course the penny dropped, this particular actor was just about to
get married. Something hard to imagine 3 years before. His
circumstances had so much moved on that he could no longer
relate to that voice. In fact, after his wedding, he decided to leave
the group as he felt he had a lot going on in his life.
So would it have been better – as perhaps the most immediate
and sometimes what is perceived as being the “correct” choice
would have been – to have created a piece simply out of their own
personal stories? Or was it better to allow them to connect to a
more universal voice that recognises the fears, struggles and
loneliness of human beings generally. To create a sense of
commonality between audience and actor to promote empathy and
understanding, rather than you sit there and listen to our stories
and how hard it has been for us. There is something about moving
away from the personal that allows (in my opinion) a greater
communication and connection. The poet and playwright T.S. Eliot
(who’s wife incidentally suffered from mental illness) was quite
critical about writing that was solely about personal emotional
expression – he believed that it is the changing or alchemising of a
personal emotion into something altogether more universal, even
objective, that was important, and that drama is actually looking for
something external to an inner personal emotion on which to hang
that feeling and change it into something much more than an
individual emotion. Eliot described it quite eloquently when he said:
Shakespeare, too, was occupied with the struggle…to
transmute his personal and private agonies into something
rich and strange, something universal and impersonal.
This is what I believe Out of Character and myself did in creating
Tales from Kafka – we turned our personal and private agonies
through the extraordinary conduit of Kafka – into something rich
and strange.
Finish with clip of the beetle speech from the dress rehearsal of
Tales From Kafka.