Joseph K @ The Gate Theatre, W11.

Life’s ambivalence manifests itself in the most maddening of complexities. For instance this morning I find myself unable to connect with my Wi-Fi despite all logins, settings and peripherals being present and correct. I have even blown into the router’s Ethernet hole – a CPR-like skill used to revive 90s game consoles. This malevolent force, invisible to us simple folk, renders the everyday impossible and pushes one to the very brink of mental collapse. Maybe such lunacy- inducing conflict is fitting when trying to review Tom Basden’s new play, Joseph K. Drawing on inspiration from Franz Kafka’s totalitarian masterwork The Trail, Joseph K has been fully transposed into the contemporary world; with the failure of modern day familiarities all conspiring to render the eponymous Joseph K into a frantic state of paranoid schizophrenia. His iPhone’s memory is wiped, all 1,900 Boots club card points are void and some malicious force has swapped over his hot and cold taps.

These series of events begin on the morning of Joseph K’s 30th birthday. Toweling off after a run, there is a knock at his door and K’s delivery of sushi finally arrives, but his Californian rolls are half eaten. In truth, this is the very least of his worries; he is subsequently arrested for a hitherto unknown offence. This is the catalyst for his rapid descent into a crazed labyrinth of bureaucratic contradiction, inept lawyers and salt of the earth glazers. As the play progresses and K’s mental stability decreases, Basden playfully increases the absurdity of the protagonist’s arc, never more so than in meetings with his lawyer who would rather defend the majesty of the Latin language and his doll collection than investigate the reasons behind K’s predicament.

With a narrative hinting at ambiguous rationales behind plot points, Basden keeps his idiosyncratic characters to a minimum, all of which are played by a cast of four. The lead is played with measured empathy and disillusionment by Pip Carter, a performance that allows us to witness the wane of his mental state, whilst struggling to maintain a slick professional exterior around his banker peers. The decision from Basden to field the remaining cast with himself, Tim Key and Sian Brooke all playing different characters is not through economic necessity, but is actually a smart device to keep K and the audience questioning whether everyone is actually who they say they are. The blurring of identities is complicit within drama concerning itself with the contemporary and is referenced in a scene where K’s legal character profile is composed from data and images gathered from his Facebook page. The multiple characters inhabiting this world offer the performers opportunity to impart their own personalities into the piece, whether it be Brooke’s vitality, Basden’s versatility or Key’s deft one-liners. Another layer of depth is added with a radio broadcast acting as a transitional device between some neat scene changes which allows Key to spike some further comedy into proceedings through the guise of a talk radio host. But this is not a device implicit for gags. During the football results K’s name is uttered; victim of a two-nil defeat dealt out by Stoke City. Is this right? And can he really hear the sounds of one of the arresting officers being flogged in his cupboard, or is it just a carpenter? Such questions and improbable scenarios abound throughout the play. Their placement not chiefly to supplement surreal laughs, but engaging with the plot’s advancement to a brutal, but logical conclusion. Which given the play’s illogical premise is perhaps its biggest and most lasting gag of all.

Of course this play is not perfect, but perfection would never be attainable given the subject nature: absurdism, paranoia, modernity, surrealism and Sushi. Themes which to be fully explored could keep a play running for hours, if not days. But what Basden has achieved with great affect is to create his own un-real reality, whereby all these themes and notions of contemporary life exist, are discussed, remain unanswered but importantly are recognized not as the contrivances of a surreal piece of dystopian theatre, but as ambiguous constructs of our everyday lives. And to bear witness to the torturous demise of Joseph K highlights our very own fallible existence.

So now Wi-Fi is finally working, but Spotify assures me with cold indifference that I am not online. And Word obnoxiously refuses to open; allegedly I don’t have an appropriate software key (a code whose existence I knew not of until this morning). All I am waiting for now is a knock at the door and a lunch delivery of semi-devoured sushi…

Michael Currell