LAUGHTER rippled through the audience from start to finish during this new production of Kafka’s Dick at the Theatre Royal in Bath.

Written by Alan Bennett and directed by David Grindley, it brings together the intelligent wit of Bennett and the surrealist angst of Kafka beautifully in a play that will make you think as well as laugh.

It opens in about 1919, with Franz Kafka (Daniel Weyman), then the author of a few short stories and a novella, asking his best friend, Max Brod (Elliott Levey), himself a successful novelist, to burn his papers after his death.

Thankfully for the rest of us, Brod did no such thing and went on to publish Kafka’s novels, stories and letters and complete a biography of him. It is down to Brod’s defiance that Kafka went on to be one of the leading lights of 20th century European literature – even though he died in 1924, never having heard the word Kafkaesque.

So imagine the mayhem that ensues when Brod and Kafka magically come back to life in 1986 in the living room of a suburban Yorkshire house belonging to Linda (Samantha Spiro) and Sydney (Nicholas Burns).

The latter, like Kafka, works in insurance and is a big fan of the Czech author, so much so he is writing an article about him.

Brod goes into panic mode and enlists the help of the rather dazed couple in keeping secret his failure to carry out Kafka’s dying wish. All copies of his books which line the shelves must be removed and the couple have to backtrack furiously every time they let slip that they know something of a personal nature about the author.

The dramatic tension hitches up a notch when Kafka’s brute of a father Hermann (Matthew Kelly) turns up and Kafka is put on trial in the sitting room.

A warm and lively combination of wit, wisdom, philosophy and musings on the nature of celebrity, this is a perfectly formed play, clever without being pompous and incisive without being dry.

The cast are without fault, the direction is witty and fast-paced and if you go along, as well as being thoroughly entertained for the evening, you might just learn a thing or two you didn’t know about old Franz.