Being Gregor Samsa

Gisli Orn Gardarsson in Metamorphoses

 

In November 2006, I saw a production that shook me out of theatre-ennui: David Farr & Gisli Orn Gardarsson’s adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis at the Lyric Hammersmith in London.

 

The evening began badly. We were trying to decide between Metamorphosis (existential angst) and a new fringe production of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (nudity). No guessing how the coin fell!

 

So we headed to Shepherd’s Bush. It took an hour of walking from the tube stop, past the drunks on the Green, a leery Afghani grocer (“Why are you looking for Bush Hall, eh?”), some Somalian kids on roller blades and at least one porn shop before we found the theatre. It was boarded up. Apparently, the new and nude version closed after 3 shows. Luckily, the Lyric was just one tube stop away.

 

But first, the challenges. Can a text as dense as Kafka’s Metamorphosis be adapted suitably for stage? How do you perform alienation? How do you translate, without artifice, the horror of a man who wakes up one morning only to find he is “transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect”? Does one acknowledge that his pain is less from being an insect and more because it’s overcast outside? Finally, how does one depict that most cruel of rasas – repugnance. Bhibatsa - the defining reaction of the family to the changed Gregor Samsa.

 

 

Metamorsphosis was first adapted for stage by Steven Berkoff in 1969. He wrote “Meditations on Metamorphosis” about his 23 years of rehearsal and musings on Kafka. He played the lead initially and was followed by others, including Tim Roth, Roman Polanski and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Phillip Glass composed music for two separate stage versions. Rene Migliaccio directed a film/live theatre adaptation that opened at La Mama in New York recently and at home, apparently a group of Mumbai theatre artists are presently working on an adaptation.

 

 

 

In the adaptation I saw, the questions above are moot, for it was theatrically and emotionally magnificent. The set, designed by Börkur Jónsson, consisted of two floors. An early 20^th century European family room downstairs, and Gregor’s bedroom upstairs with everything in it supra-real and entirely vertical. The bed was nailed to the upstage wall, as were the chair, an umbrella and a food bowl. There was a skylight that was used to perfection during Gregor’s death scene. The domesticity and unquestioned conformity downstairs contributed to the asphyxiating sense of alienation.

 

Gisli (who besides co-directing plays the lead) makes the abstraction that is Metamorphosis a very real anxiety for any one who bears the sole responsibility of earning and taking care of a family. He plays Gregor in a regular black suit and tie. Climbing all over the set, he is metamorphosed by the beauty of his actions into a dung beetle. There is a great moment when his invalid mother turns an unexpected somersault on the table in her glee at the Chief Clerk’s possible interest in Grete. But it’s never indulgent. The athleticism of the actors is balanced by the ability of the text to draw blood. When Grete stops caring for Gregor, the very Gregor who has cared so much about her violin lessons, you don’t know quite what to do. When his family is equally embarrassed and repulsed by him, it’s not unbelievable. One could feel Gregor palpably shrink, dirty himself (in an amazing theatrical moment of powder and wetness) and fester with rejection. He dies in a swirl of apple red silk hanging upside down from the skylight, limp above the dining table. In minutes, Gregor is history as winter turns to spring and we see Grete swinging in the animated sunshine of the park. Music plays, her parents applaud her and what is bad and oppressive is forgotten in the brittle optimism of normalcy.

 

Three of the four leads in this production are from Vesturport Theatre, a seminal Icelandic company who previously performed Romeo and Juliet and Buchner’s Woyzeck to critical acclaim. They lifted performance to another level with their vocal and physical skill.

 

We left the theatre clutching our thoughts close and trying to keep warm. In the tube going home, past the crazy pink-greens of neon signs, I heard some kids in hoodies rapping about the play. “…alone in a naff crowd……out of it…..Gregor had to die….BO!” A novel written in 1915: postmodern solutions from children in 2007. Go figure.

 

Kafka once wrote "This tremendous universe that I have inside my head, how can I free myself and set it free without being torn to pieces? Yet I would a thousand times rather do that than keep it confined or buried within myself."

 

So we do. Unwrap, adapt, deconstruct. To challenge the Greed, Speed & Bleed creed. To see a little better, to take another step, to free ourselves.

 

Kirtana Kumar

 

Published in The Deccan Herald Sunday Express in February 2007