Frantic Assembly is a physical theatre company in existence now for thirty years, and this is its first new commission since 2019. Apparently, Metamorphosis has been seen by over 20,000 school students since its tour opened in September 2023.
I have long admired their work, not least their gutsy Othello, but their Metamorphosis does not speak to me. The horror on show tonight is not Kafka’s existential Middle European ‘othering’ but rather poet Lemn Sissay’s ‘Dickensian’ post-COVID contemporary issues version piggybacking on a 1915 novella, which many say forecast the Holocaust (Kafka’s three sisters perished in this extermination of ‘vermin’).
Maybe it’s not for the long-in-the-tooth (Kafka was influenced by Kleist, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Flaubert, all of whom I’ve studied, and Grillparzer, whom I haven’t), more for Frantic Assembly’s league of young acolytes, a consequence no doubt of their admirable free Ignition development programme for 16- to 24-year-olds (six of tonight’s cast and creatives are graduates of it).
The first surprise is that Gregor’s metamorphosis doesn't happen till the second half (two halves of an hour each). The first half establishes his daily grinding work routine, earning a living to support his parents and sister Greta as a travelling textile salesman. Pressurised by his boss and family, he starts to fall apart.
His younger sister (Hannah Sinclair Robinson) dreams of high fashion, dresses up in his silk samples in front of the cheval mirror, as she admires a photo of a ‘Venus in Furs’ (if you get the reference—one wonders at the end whether she will be pimped by her parents).
The play opens with her, and I wonder if Sissay has shifted the focus on her transformation, which also takes place over the course of the drama. It’s as if Kafka’s notes are being played in the wrong order (apologies to Morecambe and Wise).
Kafka had father issues, and here the stentorian father (Troy Glasgow) is an overbearing, lazy lout. And the mother (Louise Mai Newberry) is a working class woman in pinafore apron with a grating, shrill laugh. They are both caricatures. As is their loud, single lodger (standing in for the three in the original) who says he’s a gardener in Portland Place… Tall Joe Layton (also the Chief Clerk) is a fearsome presence.
But what slows the production down are the long soliloquies given to each of the characters, Mr Samsa especially, who rambles on with his repetitive, clichéd tales. Sissay has injected a lot of new material: tales of travelling to China and Istanbul for their silk produce, for instance, then of the Cheshire mills that weave it.
Tension diluting, poverty backstories and homilies pad out the troubling claustrophobic entrapment metaphor and metaphysics, but a gesture is worth a thousand words. AD Scott Graham, the director and, I assume, choreographer, marshals the physicality with élan.
When Gregor (Felipe Pacheco) finally transforms into a verminous creature, it is with acrobatic agility and posture rather than a change of costume or fantastic design. It is a physical and mental breakdown. Bullying, overwork, not being able to attain the standards demanded of him.
He hangs off the central ceiling light, off the picture rail, clambers on an upturned bed, hides under a table, contorts, becomes an amoeba under his bedsheet, writhes on the floor, slithers and slumps like a fish out of water. Kafka died of starvation in 1924 aged forty as a result of laryngeal TB; Gregor Samsa dies of starvation because of neglect.
Jon Bausor’s set design is a seedy, drab, dingy grey attic room, with door, behind which Gregor’s family crouches. Clever sleight of hand produces the fearsome Chief Clerk as if out of nowhere. In front is the vestige of the family room, where father pontificates and Greta plays her violin to the lodger.
Shadowy lighting (Simisola Majekodunmi), video projection (Ian William Galloway) and Stefan Janik’s disturbing sound score (with voiceovers) contribute vastly to the overall sense of instability, to impossible aspiration, but the pace is slack, and the script is repetitive if full of word play and puns. How many times can you hear “beggars can’t be choosers”? I’m with the mother when she says. “oh please, not again…”
Interestingly, the Lyric has a history of Metamorphosis productions: Icelandic Vestuport physical company came with it in 2006, then again in 2008 and 2013. And then there’s the amazing Arthur Pita Royal Ballet production of 2011—it doesn't get more physical than that.