Restless Dreams

Max Paper lives to take words from here to there.
You know what the supreme form of paper is?
Its final and most perfect manifestation?
Hanna Tell me.
Max The paper aeroplane.

Restless Dreams. BBC Radio 4, 15 June 2024

My new play is part of a season on BBC Radio 4 commemorating the centenary of Franz Kafka’s death. It’s a play that I’ve been trying to pitch for some years - ever since a Radio 3 Kafka season in 2015 in fact. The play was inspired by the case of the hearing, in Israel’s Supreme Court, that sought finally to decide who owns Kafka. A cache of unpublished manuscripts had ended up in Israel (my play partly explains how that happened) and when the owner of that manuscript tried to sell them, the Israeli state stepped in and claimed them as national treasures, arguing that Kafka’s manuscripts should be kept in the state library alongside other great Jewish authors. And then Germany put in a counter-claim, arguing that they should take charge of the documents, placing him alongside the great German-language writers. And a court battle proceeded that lasted several years and ended up in the Supreme Court in Jerusalem.

My play isn’t exactly about that case, though it comes in (I won’t say how). Instead I thought the case resonated for me with a set of broad questions about the relationship between writing and nationhood; how far are we, as writers, products of our national identities? How far does that national identity enclose who we are as writers? Does the imagination sit within national boundaries? I wanted to write this play to explore it, not to answer it. I don’t have an answer. I am, instinctively, cosmopolitan and not particularly patriotic, but I can’t deny that I am very British in temperament, humour, reserve and more.

I have also, for a long time, been fascinated by Max Brod. He was Kafka’s friend and executor. When Kafka died, he left a will declaring that his unpublished manuscripts should be destroyed. Max Brod looked at the unpublished work, which included The Trial, The Castle, numerous short stories, letters and diaries and he disobeyed his friend. If he had obeyed Kafka’s wishes, no one would hold it against him, because I think we would barely have heard of Kafka. He might well be admired for the short story ‘Metaphorphosis’ and a handful of other things, but we would not know the major novels, and there would be no body of work that could have given rise to the idea of the Kafkaesque. Brod made Kafka’s name.

And it was he, in March 1939, who got on the last train out of Prague before the Nazis invaded, carrying only a large suitcase of Kafka manuscripts, making a perilous train journey across Central Europe to Constanta on the Black Sea, from there getting a boat that would take him and his wife to Tel Aviv. Brod was a fascinating man: a talented, confident, prolific composer, novelist, and thinker, and a gregarious, generous, faithless sensualist. In some ways he was the character-opposite to Kafka.

And while it is true to say that Brod made Kafka, it is also true to say that Kafka made Brod. Many of his works have fallen out of print and out of attention. If he he remembered, by most he is remembered as the man who preserved Kafka’s work.

Brod’s train journey forms the basis for my play. But the thrill of Kafka is, in some ways, his undecidability: are these stories meant to be funny or chilling? Are they meant to be realistic or nightmarish? Is this happening here or somewhere else? Are these real people or symbols? (Kafka, influenced greatly by Flaubert, seeks to disappear within his own work.) I have taken the dreamlike fluidity of Kafka’s work and brought it on board my train from Prague. Max Brod’s journey is plagued with uncanny Kafkaesque encounters, confusions, doubles, disappearances, when the very fabric of reality and the strict ordering of time seems to collapse. Out of this, I hope, spins a set of questions about the value of home, travel, imagination and writing.

I am always proud of my plays, but this one is very special. We have a sensational cast, led by Anton Lesser, Tracy-Ann Oberman, and Henry Goodman, who are extraordinary and threw themselves into this world with astonishing enthusiasm, commitment, and - most of all - their astounding talent. Annie Cowan and Guy Rhys (who was in my Zola: Crash) supply superb support. The piece is sound designed by Eloise Whitmore (who’s done more of my radio plays than I can possibly recall) and directed/produced by Polly Thomas (who has basically done all of my radio plays and is my great friend and artistic collaborator).

UPDATE: we’ve had a couple of great previews, one from the Observer …

and this incredibly good one from the Radio Times!