Peak Practice star Adrian Lukis plays Kafka at Watford Palace Theatre
4:21pm Thursday 1st May 2008
IN OUR celebrity obsessed age it is apt that the man playing Franz Kafka in Alan Bennett's fast-paced comedy Kafka's Dick, a play exploring attitudes to fame, should be a familiar face on our TV screens.
Adrian Lukis, best known for his role of Dr Shearer in Peak Practice and George Wickham in BBC's Pride and Prejudice, will play Kafka in the production which opens at Watford Palace Theatre next week.
Adrian's stage experience includes Cloaca, directed by Kevin Spacey, and The Philadelpha Story, directed by Jerry Zaks, both at the Old Vic and recently the 50-year-old actor found himself working on four separate projects at once.
Adrian says: "I was in Trial and Retribution playing Victoria Smurfit's barrister lover in a big court scene while also rehearsing for Private Lives. At the same time, I was cast as a repressed homosexual nobleman in Peter Greenaway's Nightwatching, shooting in Poland with Martin Freeman and Toby Jones. Then I flew back to London arriving at 1am to be ready for a read-through for Britz, a two-part terrorism drama about a Muslim family where I played a senior MI5 officer. So I went from Noel Coward to repressed homosexual to MI5 officer and egotistic barrister and it was very high pressure, but fantastic fun. I loved it."
Watching Adrian and his co-star Benedict Sandiford run through a section of Kafka's Dick, I realise this theatrical elasticity will stand him in good stead here.
Directed by Sarah Esdaile (Associate Director with the RSC on Henry VI parts I, II and III and Richard III) the play opens in Prague in 1919 where Czech writer Franz Kafka is dying. His best friend and editor, Max Brod reluctantly agrees to burn all of Kafka's unpublished work. The action switches to present day suburban England where Linda and her Kafka-nut husband Sydney are surprised to find Max Brod on their doorstep, shortly to be followed by Kafka himself, his overbearing father, Sydney's dad and a tortoise.
Bennett, the award winning writer of The History Boys and Talking Heads, plays fast and loose with history in this comic piece which Adrian admires greatly.
"It's one of the most brilliant comedies I've read. It's high octane, very quick fire with good snappy rich dialogue and Bennett's fantastic trademark vocabulary. It's like a ping-pong match.
"His choice of language and the idea of the absolutely tortured Kafka in England among the tea cosies and frills with people saying things like "mother, fetch another candlewick bedspread" or "you'll want to put a doily under that". It's not a naturalistic play. It's hopelessly funny like an episode of Frasier or a scene from The Producers.
Adrian's observations on the plays of others stems from his own desire to write. His first play Broken Mirror written at the age of 17 was "a cry of disgust and rage at the middle classes when I was feeling very tortured as a teenager".
Adrian studied at Hull University where the late Anthony Minghella was a teacher and among his contemporaries was director Simon Moore (Traffik). For Adrian, acting won through over writing while he was still a student.
"Acting is my first love," he admits. "Though, as I've got older, I find myself thinking about writing a lot more. I tend to think in terms of writing for theatre not TV. Sometimes my brain doesn't get used in acting to it's full extent. I like to be stretched."
Kafka's Dick is at Watford Palace Theatre from Thursday, May 8 to Saturday, May 31 at 7.45pm. Tickets: 01923 225671 or www.watfordpalacetheatre.co.uk