Kafka’s short stories often make a profound impact on stage, mainly because of his ability to reduce complex political worlds into flamboyantly stageable metaphors; bizarre closed systems which, compacted by his imagination, seem both irrefutable and incomprehensible. Director and adaptor Amir Nizar Zuabi and excellent Palestinian theatre company ShiberHur have turned Kafka’s 1916 story about a torture machine into an unsettling, vivid 60 minutes of theatre.
In a garden of bright yellow sunflowers, a man runs in circles like dog on a leash around his calm, brutal handler. Amer Hiehel is judge, jury, torturer and executioner, exercising his functions with sweaty, quasi-mystical devotion.
Taher Najib is his semi-feral prisoner, suggesting, with dog-like devotion, that victim and oppressor are horribly dependent on each other.
Eminent Palestinian actor Makram J Khoury is the observer who has been sent, by an indifferent but altered state, to record his view of the 12-hour torture and death that Hiehel’s executioner despairingly realises will probably be his last execution.
Under the bright artifical sun, Zuabi’s production is an exquisite torture garden. ‘The harrrow’, here a bright, transparent box in which the prisoner suffers his punishment is intended to be beautiful as well as deadly. The condemned man has the letter of the law engraved deeper and deeper on his body until he comprehends and dies.
One of the insights of this resonant production is to show how agony and martyrdom can be made into a fetish as well as a warning to others. Torture begets torturers and death-worship death, as Hiehel’s ultimate fealty to the hideous machine he tends so carefully shows. It’s an ugly lesson – made uglier by the evident beauty that it has in the eye of its upholder.