Jack Klaff Archives - thespyinthestalls.com

★★

“the lack of structure or setting or context make any attempt to understand what is happening impossible”

Franz Kafka is an extraordinary literary figure, with a wealth of brilliant works that encapsulate the human experience. Over the course of eighty minutes, writer and performer Jack Klaff delivers a lecture on Kafka’s life and works, impersonating an eclectic group of fifty characters, from Max Brod to Albert Einstein. The play uses minimal set and design, using a singular stool, no score or sound effects and minimal lighting states, with Klaff carrying the weight of the performance. An audible “shhhh” comes from the wings to signal the start of the play. Later we learn this was supposedly Kafka’s favoured start to a piece.

Throughout the play, characters introduce themselves before launching into an expositional monologue. Vague outlines of a plot can be extracted, but much like Kafka’s work, the show is an experience of eternal confusion. There are kernels of intrigue scattered throughout, but the lack of structure or setting or context make any attempt to understand what is happening impossible. Extracts from Kafka’s work such as ‘The Trial’, ‘The Castle’ and ‘Metamorphosis’ are performed, wrapped up among various character’s monologues about their relationship to Kafka. They rattle off facts about themselves, often never appearing again. The various voices of the characters were ill defined and rarely identifiable until at least three sentences in. Despite Klaff’s tearful performance, the lack of clarity makes emotional moments impossible to be moved by. Accents come and go, physical attributes are barely held and transitions are indiscernible. Despite fifty characters mentioned in the script, roughly a dozen of them are distinct. The threads of the show are totally unknowable, at no point was it clear of who, what, where or why something was happening on stage.

There are brief parts which are genuinely interesting. Annoyingly, the final few minutes tell more about the titular character than the entire play. In an interlude from the perspective of a stand-up comedian, come some much needed levity. There are specific jokes that are humorous and reflect on Kafka’s impact, including discussion of ‘esque’ as a suffix. As a celebration of Kafka, there is little to be gained in knowledge about his life or works from this piece. The play is mostly inaccessible without astute knowledge of his short stories and the nature of how his work was published. There is mention of his ancestry and speculation of his sexuality, but little exploration of who he was as a man in any emotional capacity. There are brief glimpses into how his work may have been influenced by his life; it is set up that Kafka had a fear of ‘butcher knives’ because of a family member, his most famous literary character dies by said knife.

Klaff utilises a technique in which random phrases are spoken at high volume, as if he attempting to jolt the audience to attention. Whilst reminding the audience to listen, it revealed how little attention had been captured. The eighty minutes dragged on like a surrealist nightmare, enclosed by the obligation that as a reviewer I must watch the whole thing; truly a Kafkaesque experience.

The Ice Cream Boys

Jermyn Street Theatre

Reviewed – 11th October 2019

★★★★

“There’s never been a better time to make this study, and the Jermyn Street production does it with panache”

On 11th October 2019, two days after Jermyn Street Theatre opened its new production, newspapers reported that former President of South Africa Jacob Zuma was to stand trial for corruption charges in relation to billion-pound arms deals. Charges against Zuma are not new; these same charges had simply been held off until now.

This is all very timely for The Ice Cream Boys. The sweet name belies the murky political intrigue at its heart. The single act play posits a meeting between two architects of the rainbow nation’s modern history: Zuma and his former intelligence services mastermind, Ronnie Kasrils.

In Gail Louw’s new play, we’re asked to enter into the fantasy of Kasrils and Zuma meeting in the present day. They’re old men now, their paths crossing in a starched hospital room as they both await tests and treatments for the sorts of conditions that come to men in their eighties. Zuma reports that he’s slow to pass water (‘Prostate’, he says grimly) and Kasrils that he has a possible skin melanoma after ‘all that time in the sun’. But the men, former allies, have plenty of unresolved differences. Cue a complex but taut psychological interplay, as the pair play metaphorical (and literal) chess and debate lives spent steeped in divisions of race and class.

Set design (Cecilia Trono) is simple but clever, neatly invoking a clinical white hotel room that acts as a kind of purgatory. The men are left alone to spar but for occasional interruptions by their nurse – and their past. When history intrudes, often in the form of painful memories, lighting (by Tim Mascall) shifts, jarring back to the cool, sanitised hospital room after.

The two male leads – Andrew Francis as Zuma and Jack Klaff as Kasrils – hold the stage with astonishing personality. Klaff, especially, is spellbinding, using his whole physicality to invoke Kasrils and maximising his passing resemblance to the man. The South African accents, so often mangled, are almost faultless, and the charisma such that we find ourselves in a bind as to whether to warm to or despise these deeply flawed individuals.

It might be easy to overlook the third player here; Bu Kunene as Thandi, the nurse tending to her patients with increasing exasperation. The play has Thandi transforming into numerous other characters, appearing magically transformed each time – from Zuma’s mother to Nelson Mandela, Kunene delivers with skill and a quiet certainty. So understated is her performance, especially as an increasingly steely Thandi, and so in contrast to the bombast of the Zuma and Kasrils characters, that it shows a real talent for handling sensitive characterisation. It’s also essential to see a woman here, playing and representing the many women who were implicated and caught up in – and harmed by – the political and personal machinations of the men.

The politicians appear variously as children, laughing and singing in fond waves of nostalgia and petulant when denied ice cream, and as uncompromising despots debating solutions for their divided country. Each is misty-eyed at memories of the women who influenced them – but in the next breath, we’re graphically reminded of Zuma’s rape accusation (dismissed in court but presented as near-fact here, with Zuma barely bothering to deny it).

And this is the truth of politics; complicated, messy issues led by complicated, messy and perhaps ultimately irredeemable individuals. There’s never been a better time to make this study, and the Jermyn Street production does it with panache.

KAFKA at the Finborough Theatre

★★

“the lack of structure or setting or context make any attempt to understand what is happening impossible”

KAFKA at the Finborough Theatre

Reviewed on 13th June 2024

by Jessica Potts

Photography by Marilyn Kingwill

Previously reviewed at this venue:

KAFKA

KAFKA

Jermyn Street Theatre

Reviewed – 11th October 2019

★★★★

“There’s never been a better time to make this study, and the Jermyn Street production does it with panache”

This is all very timely for The Ice Cream Boys. The sweet name belies the murky political intrigue at its heart. The single act play posits a meeting between two architects of the rainbow nation’s modern history: Zuma and his former intelligence services mastermind, Ronnie Kasrils.

And this is the truth of politics; complicated, messy issues led by complicated, messy and perhaps ultimately irredeemable individuals. There’s never been a better time to make this study, and the Jermyn Street production does it with panache.

Reviewed by Abi Davies

Photography by Robert Workman

The Ice Cream Boys

Jermyn Street Theatre until 2nd November

Previously reviewed at this venue: