Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis
KDC Theatre @ Diarama Studio Theatre
9-13 July 2002

Franz Kafka, that strange enigmatic German-speaking Jew from Christian,
Czech Prague, left for posterity a misunderstood life and two of the
finest first lines in all literature. Stephen Berkoff has adapted them
both for the stage retaining in the process the dark paranoia of the
originals but adding his own trademark startling physicality.

Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa awakes one morning to find himself
transformed into a giant insect (he'd had a bad night), is a
claustrophobic piece. Every scene is set in the imagined parlour of the
grotesque Samsa family behind which Gregor's space - an enclosed
scaffold accessible only by a ramp, looms.

As the lights go up, we see three empty stools, on their final fade the
surviving family look out and the father comments that the crocuses
will be coming out. Time moves on but nothing changes.

Nadine Hoare's production was faithful to Berkoff's vision without
being slavish and as my twenty pages of notes from less than half the
rehearsals can testify the shouty bald one would have recognised
several diversions from his own insistent stage directions.

The cast took to their roles with gusto - charging around the tight
stage and generally scaring the audience witless (in a good way). Piers
Burnell all pointless fury and self-serving inanity as the leeching Mr
Samsa, Marsha Rose as the caring but impotent Mrs Samsa and Nicole
Blyth as the growing Greta whose decline from caring sister to
cold-hearted destroyer is the catalyst for Gregor's painful demise. And
towering over all of them from his scaffold, Howard Chick, had the
unenviable task of turning himself into a beetle and hanging upside
down explaining how it made him feel free and light - his slow, slow
climb to his death at the end being among the most pain-filled moments
of theatre imaginable. In short, they were all brilliant.

There was humour too. Much needed in a play this dark. It came in its
most obvious form with the appearance near the end of the Lodgers. A
triumvirate who made the Samsas look caring and charitable, they were
played to rubber faced perfection by Tom, Luke and Mark (whose names I
have, unforgivably, forgotten). Marching in in their ridiculous poses
and issuing demands they finally storm out when Gregor, overwhelmed by
Greta's violin playing, charges forward to assert his humanity in the
face of their ugliness. It is his last act.

Like Catcher in the Rye, Metamorphosis is often assumed to be something
you read when you're 15 (unlike Catcher this is somewhat unjustified).
As such, it might be imagined that a play based on it could easily
lapse into directionless adolescent angst. Not a bit of it. As staged
by KDC, Metamorphosis emerges as an intelligent, grown-up piece of
theatre whose stark imagery and conflicting emotions persist long after
Mr Samsa spots those crocuses.