Kafka for Beginners is Scottish playwright Julian Henry Lowenfeld’s exploration of truth and freedom in his dystopian ‘Ozymandian Empire.’
Opening with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias,’ a sonnet about power and legacy, the performance is set entirely in the prison cell of one man who has rejected the lies of the empire. Following this man—who claims his name is Franz Kafka, and that everyone’s name is Franz Kafka, confounding the audience with varying lies and truths—Kafka for Beginners discusses its own fictional and our real-life politics.
Throughout the show, literary legends and pioneering artists are quoted and discussed. Notably, Orwell’s foundational ideas in 1984 are echoed by the name of the facility in which the protagonist is imprisoned (the performance’s “Imperial Ministry of Redemption” echoing Orwell’s ministries of truth, love, plenty, and peace).
Similarly, neologisms specific to the play emerge, spurring laughs from the audience at the slightly morbid comedy: in the prison, they say “hydrotherapy” instead of waterboarding and “early retirement” instead of execution, amongst other terms.
The play’s satirical dimensions exist primarily in uncomfortably suited references to modern politics. Dystopias are predictably disquieting because they exacerbate a real problem within our society into something grossly horrifying. Kafka for Beginners relates its character’s imprisonment for “heresy against the empire” (which I’d argue demonstrates incarceration for freedom of speech) to modern propaganda.
Allusions to the political murders of Alexander Litvinenko (killed by polonium radiation in 2006) and Alexei Navalny (a “prisoner of conscience” poisoned in prison in 2024), referencing Trump’s claim that he cut pharmaceutical drug prices by over 600 per cent, and familiar book and media banning highlights the realism of the performance. Lowenfeld’s play employs current affairs, crucial pieces of art, and rebellion against the status-quo set by a totalitarian regime to create his fictional, but not inconceivable, world.
Kafka for Beginners reminds us of the importance of free, critical thinking, not taking everything we’re told at face value, and the cruciality of literature and art. In modern political contexts, it develops a vital instruction to be informed and conscious.
Kafka for Beginners is running until 30 August at Dunedin Theatre at Braw Venues. Buy tickets here.
Image provided by Dunedin Theatre for press use.
