ABSTRACT
Harold Pinter’s 1993 screenplay of Franz Kafka’s masterpiece, The Trial, creates a nightmarish metaphor for modern existence: a naive and apparently innocent man is accused of a crime, but he is never given the trial promised by the title of the novel and the film, never permitted to tell his version of the events, never introduced to his accusers, and, ultimately, killed as a result of a crime we never see him commit. For those familiar with the work of British play wright Harold Pinter such a scenario seems common enough in the Pinter canon. Pinter himself admits that Kafka in general and The Trial in particular influenced his career, and it is easy enough to find critics to document the influence of the great Czechoslovakian writer from the beginning of Pinter’s career in plays such as The Birthday Party (1958) to Moonlight (1993).1 For the purposes of this collection, one of the most significant absences in both the novel and the screenplay is the prison. Characters are threatened with the judicial, not the penal process in order to illustrate the lack of distinction between imprisonment and freedom. In both, there is no difference: the accused, the witnesses, the lawyers, and the executioners are all incarcerated, ironically by their own belief in some external arbiter of justice.
