Swimming in the afternoon: adapting Kafka’s The Trial
Swimming in the afternoon: adapting Kafka’s The Trial
Recent anniversary productions of The Trial have demonstrated that Kafka's literary and juridical imagination remains a generative resource for wider legal critique. This essay examines two recent theatrical and audio performances of The Trial: Anmol Vellani's Innocence, a stage reworking which premiered in Bangalore, and Ed Harris's The Trial, a BBC radio play that compresses Kafka's text into a single hour of drama. In tracing how these works retool the novel's attention to procedural opacity for modern audiences, the essay argues that the Kafkaesque is a live aesthetic mode through which anxieties about surveillance, state power, and legal precarity are articulated. Vellani's production foregrounds the weaponisation of law in India's present while Harris's radio drama emphasizes the collapsing distinction between public and private life in contemporary Britain. Counterpointing these adaptations against film versions by Orson Welles and David Jones (by way of Harold Pinter), the essay reflects on why The Trial resonates in the twenty-first century, identifying its qualities for transmedial teleportation that extends its reach across stage, sound, and screen.
Owen, Joseph
5a9d0ced-96e5-45af-8dab-89a778d6a375
Owen, Joseph
5a9d0ced-96e5-45af-8dab-89a778d6a375
Abstract
Recent anniversary productions of The Trial have demonstrated that Kafka's literary and juridical imagination remains a generative resource for wider legal critique. This essay examines two recent theatrical and audio performances of The Trial: Anmol Vellani's Innocence, a stage reworking which premiered in Bangalore, and Ed Harris's The Trial, a BBC radio play that compresses Kafka's text into a single hour of drama. In tracing how these works retool the novel's attention to procedural opacity for modern audiences, the essay argues that the Kafkaesque is a live aesthetic mode through which anxieties about surveillance, state power, and legal precarity are articulated. Vellani's production foregrounds the weaponisation of law in India's present while Harris's radio drama emphasizes the collapsing distinction between public and private life in contemporary Britain. Counterpointing these adaptations against film versions by Orson Welles and David Jones (by way of Harold Pinter), the essay reflects on why The Trial resonates in the twenty-first century, identifying its qualities for transmedial teleportation that extends its reach across stage, sound, and screen.
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Swimming in the afternoon adapting Kafka s The Trial
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e-pub ahead of print date: 16 October 2025
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Local EPrints ID: 506851
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/506851
ISSN: 1752-1483
PURE UUID: d2a19180-7d6c-4eff-a720-6d6e764e70ad
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Date deposited: 19 Nov 2025 17:33
Last modified: 20 Nov 2025 03:01
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