Kafka and Son
reviewed by Mary Brennan
August 27, 2010
Alon Nashman’s bleak and utterly compelling Kafka and Son has an intensely pulverising effect even on those of us who didn’t have bullying, authoritarian fathers. This is the nightmare territory of adults projecting their values, ambitions, frailties and failures onto their children. Then blaming them when, almost inevitably, they don’t conform to expectations.
Even in his thirties, the writer Franz Kafka couldn’t escape the tyranny of his father’s contempt. He filtered it into his fiction, as if words could exorcise it but to no avail. Kafka senior, the overbearing self-made man, effectively emasculated his only son.
Nashman seamlessly serves up both sides of this story. As Kafka senior, he looms larger than life – all bluff and hearty even when shredding Franz’s fragile self-esteem. As Franz, he seems to shrivel into half his size and become a nervy waif who nonetheless recounts his tribulations with an unexpected comic flair. Again, like Gurney-Randall’s Mussolini, the sheer finesse of the performance demands your applause. Nashman pulls you right into the entrails of a mental abuse that makes your heart pound and your skin crawl. The relief of walking out into daylight makes you know how brilliant he is.