Metamorphosis

Tonight to the Playhouse to see Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a joint production by the Lyric Hammersmith and the Vesturport Theatre in Reykjavik, directed by David Farr and Gisli Orn Gardarsson. It is the first performance in the UK outside London. It was a superb production, with excellent staging and convincing performances. Here is the Daily Post review:

If this production is the yard- stick by which Capital of Culture will be measured, then any group planning to stage drama mustn’t hesitate to take it in – and tremble at the standard required. Writer Franz Kafka understood well the divisions and hysteria caused by those who clamber along the lines between the various “boxes” that make up society, and the need to purge the different and the dangerous, as well as the urgency for pretence amongst the blooms.

This joint effort by the Lyric Hammersmith and the Vesturport Theatre in Reykjavik is directed by David Farr and Gisli Orn Gardarsson; and is the first performance in the UK out of London. The story tells how Gregor wakes up one day to find he has turned into a repulsive insect and focuses on the reaction of his horrified family, how they turn on him and ultimately fall foul of their fears and prejudices.

It is facile yet necessary to pen a string of superlatives, but in truth no critical assessment in mere words can do justice to this astonishing group performance. The audience was literally thunderstruck. The production succeeds on numerous levels: Kafka’s storytelling skills and its adaptation for stage, the superbly paced direction, the homespun simplicity of the dual set and an acrobatic tour de force by Bjorn Thors as Gregor, matched for impact by Unnur Osp Stefansdottir as his sister Grete. Indeed, all the cast deserve bouquets of honours: Tom Mannion as the straight-laced and unbelieving father, and Elva Osk Olafsdottir as the distraught mother, and Jonathan McGuinness doubling up as Herr Fischer and Herr Stietl.

If you have the slightest persuasion towards theatre, drop what you are doing immediately and book tickets for what will become the “talk of the town”.

And this is Michael Billington in the Guardian, reviewing the original London show:

How do you stage Kafka’s Metamorphosis? Extremely athletically in the case of this co-production between the Lyric and the Icelandic company, Vesturport, who have already astonished us with their Romeo and Juliet and Woyzeck. But the triumph of the production is that it uses physical ingenuity to get to the tragic heart of Kafka’s fable.

The premise is familiar: Gregor Samsa, a Czech commercial traveller, awakes one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect. But Kafka’s mix of realism and fantasy is instantly caught in Born Jonsson’s split-level set. The lower level is a drably furnished Prague sitting-room. On the upper storey, we get a ceiling-eye view of Gregor’s room, reminiscent of a weirdly-angled Anthony Green Royal Academy painting. The contrasting viewpoints immediately usher us into Kafka’s world of strange juxtapositions.

You can, of course, interpret the story in many ways: autobiographically, Freudianly, symbolically. But David Farr and Gisli Orn Gardarsson, as joint adaptor-directors, see it as domestic tragedy and political metaphor. Gregor becomes an image of marginalised people everywhere. His father, here christened Hermann after Kafka’s dad, is inseparable from his quasi-military, bank-messenger’s uniform. And the family’s lodger turns on Gregor vehemently to proclaim “the time will come when we will clear the vermin from our society”.

Kafka wrote his story in 1912; but in this version it becomes a prophetic vision of the European nightmares to come.

The one thing it is not is a simple story of an insect. Gardarsson, who plays Gregor in a business suit, brilliantly expresses his physical transformation by hanging from the ceiling and leaping from one precarious toehold to another. But, under the acrobatic daring, he constantly reminds us of Gregor’s residual humanity. He creeps up on the family to eavesdrop on a discussion of their financial future and, with unbearable poignancy, is destroyed by his urge to listen to his sister’s violin-playing.

Quite rightly, it is the family who are the real grotesques. Ingvar E Sigurdsson’s father is a domestic bully who hurls a chair, on which Gregor has sat, out of the window. Nina Dogg Filippusdottir also captures immaculately the sister’s terrifying translation from Gregor’s helpmate into his tormentor.

But the final moment when the family go for a spring walk to an exultant tune from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, captures perfectly what Nabokov once called the “ironic simplicity” of Kafka’s climax.

Links

• Metamorphosis website: background information and learning resources