The premiere performance of Scottish company Vanishing Point’s adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis was just about the most intense experience it’s possible to have in a theatre.
It came in March 2020, at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, in the days before lockdown closed everything.
There was a sense of foreboding in the air. No-one could quite believe what was looking inevitable, and we collectively wondered whether even sitting in a theatre was a good idea.
Unsettling times
The theatre company themselves, meanwhile, were imminently scheduled to take their Italian version of the show (it’s a co-production with the Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione) to the country which was then the epicentre of the pandemic in Europe.
For anyone whose nerves were unsettled by the world that week, the show’s dark, deathly body horror didn’t exactly help.
What a treat it is, then, to now visit a theatre and enjoy it without a sense of impending calamity all around.
The good news is, Vanishing Point’s The Metamorphosis is still an excellent, if troubling, piece of theatre.
The premise of Kafka’s story is simple; one morning, after a night of strange dreams, Gregor Samsa awakes to find he’s been turned into a giant insect.
His family are horrified, but they try to adjust to this new reality.
Slightly modern twist
The story here has been modernised only slightly, with Gregor now a motorcycle courier whose inability to work means his sister can’t now study violin at the Conservatoire, and his demanding parents have to find jobs as border guards.
The staging is impressively inventive. There’s no full-body insect suit. Instead, Sam Stopford’s Gregor becomes invisible to his family, able to communicate only with the identically-pyjamaed young Italian now in his place, played by Nico Guerzoni.
This interloper still seems disgusting to everyone else.
Gregor’s family, meanwhile – mother, father and sister Greta, played by Elicia Daly, Paul Thomas Hickey and Alana Jackson – gossip and bicker about him through a blurred screen, eventually forced to fawn over the awful bourgeoisie couple they have to rent a room to.
With stark, muted strip-lighting by Simon Wilkinson and a surging electronic sound backdrop by Mark Melville, adapting director Matthew Lenton has created a psychological horror that’s all the more sinister for its slow pace.
The message in the metaphor
It’s when we put the ‘metaphor’ in Metamorphosis, though, that it really takes off.
When we start to think of Gregor as a vessel for the ‘other’, perhaps a refugee, someone of a different race or culture, or just a young person discovering their identity or their sexuality independently – that the story’s many possible levels unfold endlessly before us.
- The Metamorphosis is at Dundee Rep until Saturday, April 2. www.dundeerep.co.uk
