“Brilliant! That was horrible!” grins Daniel Emery, the director behind Joseph K, after a particular scene in which Beth Hindhaugh’s character, Leni, seeks to seduce a stuttering and rather unwilling Joseph K. Not a comment that you’d expect to hear in the context of a production edging ever more closely towards its opening night, but as I learn, this is a play that seeks actively to unnerve.

Life is going well for banker Joseph K. A promotion is on the horizon and he is in control of his life – or so he thinks. On his 30th birthday, a takeaway order of sushi arrives, rather unexpectedly, with two men who have not only helped themselves to his California roll, but who also insist on arresting him. Joseph is then thrown into a convoluted and disjointed maze of bureaucracy from which there is no escape. His phone has stopped working and, more importantly, the 1,900 points on his Boots card have disappeared.

Emery tells me that the play is inspired by Kafka’s The Trial rather than a direct adaptation of it, relocating the action to twenty-first-century London. For those who prefer to rest safe in the knowledge that the dystopian future or a totalitarian state that Kafka concocts is far removed from our own way of life, Emery’s direction of Joseph K shatters all element of this illusion, offering an uncanny reflection of the absurdities and befuddlements of contemporary life and “collapsing the boundary between K’s world and our own” through an astute manipulation of theatrical space.

“In The Trial, there is a definite sense of unease that registers in the sprawling bureaucratic world that Joseph finds himself hurled into; he walks outside to find court offices outside his home. In Joseph K, I wanted to transfer this sense of unease by drawing attention to its status as play – drawing the audience in, and toying with theatrical convention.”

And watching the cast rehearse, I do notice that the characters are in a state of flux as Emery has so intended, constantly lurching between naturalism and a startling absurdity. As the cast transition from character to character on stage, there is always a sense that something just isn’t quite right. When I ask the cast how they manoeuvre their audience to create this disquieting effect, Jamie Robson, the play’s lead, explains that “there are lots of moments that are not quite fitting with the mood already established, but without disrupting the overall logic of the scene”.

Indeed, the cast often deliberately break character; bursting into song, intermitting conversation to offer up Latin proverbs, or watching on in the background as a scene unfolds. There is an unmistakeable meta-theatricality about the play, and Robson is frenetic as Joseph as the small supporting cast of four work tirelessly around him in order to conceive the jarring and self-conscious atmosphere that Emery envisions, as he puts it, “tapping into the fear that are lives are not our own”.

Joseph K runs from Tuesday 29th November to Saturday 3rd December at Corpus Playroom