It's hard to say whether The Kafkamachine will give you what you're after in an evening of post-modern adaptations of Franz Kafka's short stories. If you are looking for faithful recreations of the text, bringing the stories to the stage with any kind of linearity, you are in the wrong black box. The production is a kind of Kafka to the nth degree, embellishing Kafka's tendencies to the surreal by immersing the audience in an atmospheric balancing act without offering a safety net. Kafka is everywhere in the performance space. His image is on the walls in quadruplicate.
White books are everywhere, surrounded by black words.
His text is literally strewn throughout the studio, pasted on the walls, scattered along the floor in big, bold type. And the mood is Kafka at its core. The overall atmosphere is the most powerful aspect of the production, standing out in far greater detail than character, plot or dialogue. The setting and costumes suggest a kind of automated officescape, a bizarro world for dark Dilberts counting the hours of a humorless day. Paranoia fills the space from your first uneasy entrance onto the stage, the two principal characters already talking to each other through muffled telephone lines.