Personally I find Block to be the most interesting character in The Trial, mainly because he stands as a haunting vision of what Joseph K’s future could hold but also because he is very enjoyable to play. Block is a strange little man who has been on trial for a long time, he explains that he has ‘taken on five extra lawyers apart from Huld’ (Berkoff 1988, P. 51.) Who is also Joseph K’s lawyer. When Block first enters he jumps onto K’s back as he believes he is an intruder in Huld’s house (where Block lives). He then begins to tell K about his struggles against the judicial system. At the beginning of the rehearsal process I found Block to be very difficult to play. Lucy suggested that he is an agitated and paranoid character due to what he has been through. So upon entering I moved around a lot and was constantly looking over my shoulder into the wings to see if anyone was spying on me. These quick movements actually made my characterization more difficult at first as I felt that my lines had to be said quickly in order to match my physicalisation and since some of my lines were very wordy and had long sentences in, it was difficult to articulate them.But through more rehearsals and line learning I was able to speak in a way that I felt fitted the character and also allowed me to speak clearly, taking pauses only when it was necessary.

When further looking into Blocks physicality I decided that playing him slight hunched over would reflect his scatty nature as well as reinforcing him as a tragic character. This also helped me develop a nasally voice that I felt worked very well with his hunched over movements. Block is a very important character in The Trial, especially in our version, which features many comical characters. Block is different as he represents a change in the bathos. Block’s story is of course very tragic, he is a broken man. By this point in the play we have come to connect with Joseph K and we see in Block elements of him so by extension elements of ourselves. There is no doubt that Block’s crimes are also non existent so he too has be deceived by the law. He was also once a rich businessman but has been betrayed for no reason in the same way that Joseph K has. This was something I thought about very carefully when playing Block. It also occurred to me that he is somewhat similar to the character Gollum in The Lord Of The Rings, both characters have been morphed physically and mentally by the constraints they have been placed under. Despite consciously making this link I did not deliberately base my characterisation on Gollum and it was not until quite late in the rehearsal process that this occurred to me. But this did help me think more about my physicality especially as Block’s character develops throughout Act Two.

When Huld reveals to Block that he has done little to no work on his case, Block begins to have a break down. For me this was the most physical and tragic moment of The Trial. Block becomes more and more worked up as he learns that all his efforts have been a complete waste of time. By this point I was very crouched down, almost crawling on the floor in fact, I wanted to show how Block had changed from when he first came on stage. So I tried to move quicker and quicker pacing up and down until collapsing into a mess at the front of the stage. Despite having no lines in this part I was able to use Huld’s lines to somewhat dictate how I would move, until finally building up and leaping to attack Huld after saying my final line. I found Block to be an immensely enjoyable character to study and play and feel that he is very important character within The Trial.

Thanks for reading, Alex.

Works Cited

Berkoff, Steven (1988) The Trial, Metamorphosis and In The Penal Colony, Amber Lane Press.

Throughout the process of making The Trial, all of the characters have grown immensely. Perhaps two of the characters who have grown the most are the Guards. Guard One (played by me) and Guard Two (played by Emma) were two of the very first characters that were looked at in the rehearsal process. The Guards enter at the start of the play and are the first characters that Joseph K meets. They come into his room, inform him of his arrest and begin to search through his things. We began by playing the guards as London police officer type characters with cockney accents. Lucy explained that she saw the guards as the kind of characters who believe they are important but in reality don’t really know what they are doing. So we tried to take this into account when performing the scene. Since the guard scene is the first one in the play it was important that the pace was set for the rest of the piece. So we kept the speed quite quick, saying our lines so that they would roll into each others. This also helped increase Joseph K’s confusion at the situation he’d found himself in.

The Guard’s scene ends as the Inspector (played by Larissa) arrives, originally Lucy wanted to keep us on the stage through most of the Inspectors scene which would show that we are all operating under the same authority. At first we improvised silent discussion whilst listening to Joseph K and the Inspector. This silent mockery of Joseph K helped us increase the sense that the guards were a sort of comedy double act.  As rehearsals went on Lucy decided to cut this and have us exit when the Inspector enters. She explained that we distracted from the Inspectors scene, which explained some important things to K and the audience. The interaction that we had standing at the back in the Inspectors scene needed to be included within our scene, so that we appeared to function as a unit, which increases the idea of the guards being a comedy double act.

This actually made the scene a lot more difficult as we had less time in which to establish our characters, especially as the scene was meant to be very speedy. But making the scene more challenging seemed to help us to make it better, as we had less time we had to exaggerate everything more, so the guards characteristics became heightened and we became more cocky. We spent a whole session working on the physicality of our characters and developing a different walk for each character. My walk involved me leaning from side to side when I moved as well as moving my feet out away from my body. I defiantly took some influence from Monty Python’s ‘Ministry of Silly Walks’ sketch. This walk helped my character develop a kind of arrogance which was reflected in the way that I spoke to Joseph K. In this session we also looked at facial expressions, I decided that by raising my lower lip and one eye-brow I could adopt a kind of accusing face.

Thanks for reading, Alex