‘AMERIKA’ by Franz Kafka

Pygmalion theatre, Vienna, 22 March 2002

That Kafka’s novel Der Verschollene / Amerika should have come to be known under two alternative titles is emblematic of its split identity. ‘Karl Roßmann aus Europa’ has been exiled from the old continent under dubious circumstances; he arrives in New York full of nervous hope, but wholly unprepared for the realities of a new start. The gradual failure of this American dream, the disillusionment of a life that has been forced upon him, typifies the familiar emphasis in Kafka’s work on the passive helplessness of the individual made redundant by the machinery of the modern world.

This is a story more of immigration, then, than emigration, a story that takes place on the threshold of arrival, not departure. The Romanian-born Geirun Tino’s dramatisation of the novel for his Pygmalion theatre in Vienna emphasises this from the start: the background, a poorly painted, faded American flag with stars of David set against the stripes, echoes the white square of canvas on the floor, in the opposing corners of which, facing each other like wrestlers, are a suitcase and a stool, suggestive of the contrast between the immigrant’s journey and the native’s fixity. These two props represent the positions assumed by the only two actors of the play; Roßmann’s first encounter in the New World is to be with a street-painter, busy sketching the statue of liberty. It is a happy conceit: on the tabula rasa of a fresh start they must re-fashion their lives. This second actor gradually assumes a series of conflicting identities, representing the various characters encountered by Roßmann, but throughout he remains a street-painter, often sketching out what he is saying as if to confer reality onto his speculations. Initially, he reveals himself as the ‘Heizer’ of the novel’s opening scene, soon claiming to be ‘Onkel Jacob’ and therefore Roßmann’s natural point of contact. The contrasts between the old world and the new are consistently highlighted: ‘auf Mitleid darf hier keiner hoffen’ insists the street-painter, receiving small change from the audience in his efforts to beg for money, as if to prove his point. Roßmann has no hope of reclaiming his ‘lost’ suitcase (‘hier sind die Sitten auch anders’), and whilst his attempts to translate a German riding song pointedly fail, it is perhaps more telling that the street-painter’s English is equally poor, illustrative of an inability to assimilate and adapt.

After the interval, further tricks are played with the latter’s identity. Through the eyes of Roßmann we have been led to believe that he is indeed ‘Onkel Jacob’, but now he reveals himself as Robinson, the Irish immigrant. Roßmann does not want to believe this, repeatedly stammering his uncle’s name like an amulet to ward off incipient uncertanties, happier with a consoling lie than a harsh truth. Roßmann no longer has any trust in this street-painter, accusing him of pilfering his suitcase and, in particular, the photograph of his family. Robinson’s comic attempts to repaint this portrait on his canvas inevitably fail, merely serving to emphasise the unbridgeable ocean between his past and his future.

The final scene takes us to the Hotel Occidental. Roßmann has his job as a ‘Liftjunge’, but is in the process of being fired by the street-painter as ‘Herr Oberkellner’. The changes of identity seem to be deliberately confusing here: when accused of being seen skipping his shift Roßmann protests ‘Es muß doch um eine Verwechslung handeln’. The street-painter telephones both Roßmann’s mother and the ‘Frau Oberköchin’, donning a wig in order to become the two ladies as he acts out their side of the telephone call, which in turn casts Roßmann himself, for the duration of the calls, as the ‘Oberkellner’. This strikes the distinctively Kafkaesque note: the protagonist is confused and set upon by circumstances beyond his control, despite his best attempts to carve out a new identity in this brave new world. The play finishes with Roßmann fired and abandoned; all his hopes have come to nothing, embodied in the shifting personae of the street-painter, who walks off lustily singing the star-spangled banner. Silhouetted against the American flag, Roßmann’s final cry could have issued from any number of Kafka’s heroes: ‘Ich hab’ genug gehabt!’

The dramatisation of Kafka’s novel raises some wider questions of genre specificity, as well as individual technical considerations. In a play, one is largely reliant on dialogue and gesture, stripped of the narrative capacities of prose; Kafka’s spare language permits this transfer, however, as Geirun Tino has claimed elsewhere: ‘Meines Erachtens schrieb Kafka theatralischer als Jelinek’. Intriguing questions of two-way influence are raised; is the fact that the dialogue inevitably reminds one of subsequent epigones, of Beckett, Pinter or Stoppard, simply a function of Kafka’s influence on them, or has the adapting playwright read backwards through literary history? The two actors certainly seem to belong to twentieth century traditions of the double act, Laurel and Hardy, Vladimir and Estragon, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Much vaudeville fun is had with Roßmann’s clothes, his dirty but aspirational suit, ‘der tatsächlich nur in Europa möglich ist’, his Charlie Chaplin hat and his over-polished shoes, constantly being taken off so that he can walk on the painter’s canvas, and then used as ersatz objects of representation, as props that imply both an obvious poverty but also that necessity is the mother of invention. The roles place great demands on the actors, but it is a challenge they meet with aplomb; in particular Ip Wischin as the street-painter, who embodies the ‘Other’ to Roßmann’s Everyman and manages to convey his many changes of identity whilst still remaining the same impoverished painter, covering a wide range of registers from the comic (Rolf Harris, Marcel Marceau?) to the bewilderingly brutal. One could take issue, perhaps, with the choices made by the playwright, the scenes and characters elided or omitted: the Oklahoma theatre, for example, has disappeared entirely, but then given that the novel has been transferred into a theatre, and moreover with a self-consciously vaudevillean leading character, this dramatisation seems to be implicit in the structure of the play itself. It would be churlish, ultimately, to criticise the sins of omission; rather, we should celebrate the successes of commission that cohere into a provocative rejuvenation of an often overlooked novel.