The Trial of Judith K

Shannon Hengen is an assistant professor of English at Laurentian
University.

Clark gives special thanks to Franz Kafka in her acknowledgments, making
explicit the link between her play and his 1925 novel The Trial. As
theatre the play no doubt succeeds in part because of its sex, violence,
wit, and fast pace (Act I has 11 scenes and Act II has 10, to be played
without blackouts), while the fact that the lead role is female provides
topical interest. Clark could easily have emphasized the gender politics
even more to provide a thematic centre, for one wonders why Judith K.
dies in the end. If this is to be the tragedy of Everywoman in the 1980s
and 1990s, then Judith should be more typical. In what sense does a
handsome 30-year-old divorced white woman, a corporate loans officer for
the Commerce bank on her way to promotion, speak for all Canadian women?

In contrast, if she is meant to be an extraordinary woman, then what
lesson are we to learn from her death? Another female character late in
the play explains to Judith K. that she has relied too much on
“outside help. Particularly from men.” Judith herself speculates
just before her execution that she has been “too busy grabbing” to
pay attention to what she has. Who, then, is she, and what does she
have? Isolated, ambitious, and unheroic, Judith K. dies pointlessly,
having tried to be “organized” (her word) and smart, and to work the
system to her advantage; we can only guess that she is punished for her
lack of connection with other women. Is there then to be no place at all
for female ambition?

The plot and characterization follow Kafka’s novel very closely:
Judith K. is arrested for an unspecified crime, seduced by one man who
claims to have the necessary “influence” to help her, further
exploited by another, betrayed by a colleague at work, and given bad
advice by everybody. The nightmare is explained by a character late in
the play in its longest speech, a declaration that wanting to make it in
the system is in itself an indication of a naiveté that death alone
will cure.