Metamorphosis at the Lyric Hammersmith

Metamorphosis at the Lyric Hammersmith

21 July, 2008
by: Robin

Someone who hasn't seen the Lyric Hammersmith's Metamorphosis, originally a 2006 production but revived this month, might ask: how do you adapt a Kafka story about a travelling salesman who wakes up one morning as a giant beetle? Gregor Samsa is strange, privately neurotic and uniquely punctilious, but he's playable, as Björn Thors shows. Nor is the problem even in the transformation: Thors's acrobatic physical ingenuity, the emphatic horror of the other cast and a little imagination results in a more effective piece than the use of ungainly prosthetics or special effects would probably allow. The incredible staging – which uses two levels, one oriented vertically to create an unreal seeing-in-plan effect – also helps carry the audience along, along with the lighting, which is natural and flashy in all the right proportions, and some appropriate music.

The clue to the difficulty here is the author. Kafka always writes in slow understatement, particularly in his description of the fantastic and the horrible. In fact he’s even more pedantic than Samsa, almost boringly so. And he's hardly cheerful. These are qualities capable of admiration, but the result of a straight adaption for the stage would presumably be deadpan miserablism with the power to alienate most audiences. So the Lyric's production, in collaboration with Icelandic company Vesturport, modulates freely on the original text and takes the opportunity to play things much more openly and demonstratively. Variations on Kafka's plot are contrived to afford the characters obvious emotional extremes and unexpectedly colourful scripting and acting bring those out, creating a significantly different mood. More blatant symbolism than Kafka’s is also introduced, signposting disgust, rejection and desperation. It might be in compensation for the fact that the play as a whole isn't nearly as dejected and depressing as the book.

In fact, the most striking departure is that sections of the story are actually played as farce. Jonathon McGuiness's lodger, standing in for the three fairly two-dimensional characters in the book, is an especially comic creation. (The sexual humour involving his character has some of the funniest moments, partly because it's so improbably slipped in. And if you didn’t realise that it’s quite easy to read Metamorphosis as an allegory of homosexual persecution, by completely perverse association some of the gags do a reasonable job of pointing that out.) Dour Kafka purists might be alarmed, and one undeniably wrong note is the weird emotional narrative represented by the story’s ending; it works in the original context, but the play's variations make it looks misplaced. It doesn't matter though: this production doesn't have a boring moment, and taken on its own terms it works, in a refreshing and original way.

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Robin