Hits Scottish capital next month
This summer, future pupils and barristers are heading to the Edinburgh Fringe with an eight-person show centred on a Kafkaesque trial, featuring bizarre and absurd twists — including a defence restricted to speaking in rhyming couplets.
Written by members of the Inner Temple Drama Society, the play, The Trial: In Absurdia, adapts Franz Kafka’s famously frustrating look at legal bureaucracy in The Trial.
“Kafka meets Monty Python when mild-mannered accountant Jo is arrested abroad for a nonsensical crime,” the ad promoting the play reads. “Their predicament escalates into a surreal nightmare of endless red tape and baffling legal theatrics.”
Jo enlists Sam, a barrister equipped with a powdered wig and an unshakable belief in justice. But as Sam battles for fairness within an arbitrarily punitive system, every attempt at reason is met with absurdity.
Acting in the play are Inner Temple students, future pupils at chambers including Serle Court and 4BB, as well as practising barrister Gordana Balac. Legal Cheek readers may also recognise the director, Thomas Isaac, whose boots-on-the-ground approach landed him a paralegal role in London.
Besides budding legal minds, audiences in Edinburgh can expect typically bizarre rules and perplexing procedure, amid the frustrating confusion of a protagonist embroiled in the jargon and arcana of a justice system no one fully understands.
The Inner Temple Drama Society describes their comedy as “A sharp parody of Kafka’s The Trial, The Trial: In Absurdia skewers bureaucracy, legal quirks and the limits of fairness, blending witty dialogue, surreal twists and biting satire.”
The play will be performed Monday 18 to Saturday 23 August in the Haldane Theatre at the neoclassical Surgeons’ Hall in Edinburgh, with tickets £8 — or free for those infant fans of Kafka parodies aged 18 months or younger.
