Theatre

How do you turn a man into an insect? It’s a question that buzzes round my brain like a hyperactive fly as the District Line rattles out to Bromley-by-Bow. I’ve been given access to rehearsals for the Lyric Hammersmith’s production of Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’, and it’s intriguing to imagine what will be revealed. Many people, not least Vladimir Nabokov, have pondered exactly what the central character Gregor Samsa looks like when he wakes up equipped with six legs and an exoskeleton. But is there any way of depicting this on stage without making it look like bad sci-fi?

Gísli Örn Gardarsson, artistic director of Iceland’s Vesturport Theatre, quickly puts me right. ‘If you were doing a film, then maybe you’d think of putting Gregor in a cockroach costume, but when it came to doing it in the theatre, it didn’t even occur to me. This is really about a family, with a person they love and who’s been supporting them for all of these years – and suddenly, he’s changed. Little by little, they become more and more brutal towards him – in some ways, it’s a microscopic representation of how people change their behaviour towards others in situations like the Holocaust, or the genocide in Rwanda. That dynamic for me is more interesting than the fact he’s turned into a cockroach.’ Feature continues