What's On

From one of Perth's leading devisor-performers, Humphrey Bower, and the creative team behind last year's award-winning 'Hiro', comes the world premiere of THE APPARATUS; a surreal black comedy adapted from the works of Franz Kafka, at The Blue Room Theatre 13-31 August.

This visceral new production created from three stories by the master of the macabre Franz Kafka, explores the twists and turns of legal and bureaucratic absurdity, safety and security, anxiety and paranoia, and absurd and cruel forms of punishment and oppression; all linked by the concept of the apparatus.

'Before the Law' is a haunting parable about a man waiting outide a door; 'The Burrow' is a black comedy about a creature obsessed with holes and tunnels; and 'In the Penal Colony' is a perverse demonstration by an insane officer of a torture device on an island prison.

Although Kafka's stories were written a hundred years ago, they have never been more timely than they are today. Orginally, they were variosuly interpreted as neurotic nightmares, surrealist fantasies, existential allegories, theological parables or crtiques of administrative bureaucracy, but today; they now seem more like prophetic visions of our current obsession with national security.