4 STARS, June 3-10. It's a nightmarishly good performance from the RSS of Franz Kafka's classic Metamorphosis. Richard Nye enjoys/endures a production that masterfully explores universal human fears
I’d forgotten after 30 years. Forgotten, three decades on from my one and only exposure to Metamorphosis, just how nightmarish is this short, sharp lightning strike of genius from Franz Kafka’s enigmatic pen. The RSS, with its arresting production of Steven Berkoff’s famous stage adaptation, changed all that. Across town, in the real world, London was enduring its own horror that Saturday night. But in the cocooning darkness of the Mary Wallace Theatre, the shadowy world of Gregor Samsa and his family had us hideously enthralled, pinned down in the no man’s land between the imagined and the real.
The plot is familiar enough: Exhibit A in Kafka’s catalogue of distorting mirrors. Gregor, an overworked travelling salesman, awakes to find himself transformed into a specie of verminous insect. His family respond with a mixture of sympathy, revulsion and self-interested concern for their own financial wellbeing, while his employers – emissaries from some utilitarian commercial dystopia – betray only irritation at his inability to work.
The condition deteriorates throughout the play until finally, broken physically and distressed by the increasingly heartless attitude of his family, Gregor wills himself into the arms of death. It is – if you’ll pardon the tautology – ‘Kafkaesque’: an imprecise term, as overworked as Gregor himself, but partially defined by Richard T Kelly as “a sense of suddenly inhabiting a world in which one’s customary habits of thought and behaviour are confounded and made useless”.
There is, of course, farce as well as feeling in this stinging tale. But the comic absurdity is overwhelmed, at least in this production, by a torrent of horrors intensified by the piercing, penetrating sound effects, anachronistically Orwellian, yet simultaneously evocative of Donne: these gongs are bonging for us all.
For hidden beneath the leaves of Metamorphosis is a nest of near-universal fears. There is the fear of helplessness, the sudden and/or gradual erosion of control over body and mind. There is the related anguish over loss of identity: is this unfortunate creature still Gregor, or has the real Gregor departed from his unrecognizable body? Either way, the sense of lost self hovers over the play, as surely as Gregor himself looks down in mortified wonder from the strange new vantage point of his bedroom wall. And then there is the turmoil of time’s irreversible march. Sometimes, as the Samsas slowly come to accept, things will never be better in the morning.
The psychological complexity torments us. Gregor’s dependants are not the unequivocal moral monsters of popular belief, absorbed entirely in their own aspirations and needs. Their collective disgust at Gregor is both nuanced and progressive. Mr Samsa, apparently a brutish slob, is ultimately less willing to banish his putative son than the initially compassionate Grete, Gregor’s sister, whose care and concern undergo a shocking metamorphosis of their own – into loathing. The heroism of a moment, transforming oneself into a human shield against terrorists, is one thing – the patient cultivation of steady, enduring self-sacrifice is quite another. Who is to condemn poor, talented Grete?
Even Gregor’s fate is ambiguous. Is it just despair, tinged with understandable self-pity, that drives him remorselessly to his end? Or is there something vaguely Christlike in his death? Gregor had long borne the burden of providing financially for his family. Is he now, in his altered state and premature demise, taking on the weight and form of their sin as well – the weakness and compromise that has left them so drained of love?
Take your choice: either way Gregor’s death is a blessed release. For us, as well as for him. One hour with the RSS in Kafkaworld is riveting: any longer and the fear is that one might not emerge.
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