Franz Kafka was one strange duck. Anyone who could write novels such as Metamorphosis and The Trial then tell the executor of his estate that on the writer's death he (the executor) had to burn those manuscripts which hadn't been published, would be one unusual aquatic avian. Fortunately for us, the executor didn't burn the manuscripts, he had them published. Which leads me to the Royal Alex Theatre where Tuesday night, courtesy of a friend with tickets, I watched a play based on Metamorphosis.
The narrative of Metamorphosis is well known: one morning the dutiful Gregor, the sole provider for his parents and sister, wakes up to discover he has turned into a giant beetle causing revulsion in his parents and eventually his sister. At just 85 minutes long - with no intermission - the play was nothing so much as a short, intense assault on the psyche whether one viewed it as a domestic tragedy or a metaphor for the coercion and cruelty of a totalitarian state. Or, much more intriguingly, a metaphor for Iceland's recent financial woes as the cast, with the exception of Tom Mannion, a graduate of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, were Icelandic: yes, Icelandic.
Not so long ago, certainly no more than 15 years or so, Iceland was a sort of Gregor-like place. Remote, largely unknown and placid (except for a protracted fishing dispute with Britain that started in the 1950s which the Fleet Street tabloids dubbed "the cod wars"). Then governments around the world started to deregulate their financial sectors, Iceland's among them, only to be broadsided by the recent international economic collapse that took the country's banks and plunged them into the freezing North Atlantic. Just as Gregor and his family woke up one day and found everything had changed overnight so too did Icelanders wake up to find their prosperous country had turned into the economic equivalent of a beetle.
All of the actors, with the exception of Tom Mannion as the father Herman, were rather too broad, rather too busy for my taste, and Víkingur Kristjánsson as Herr Fischer, the lodger to whom the parents want to rent a room and marry off Gregor's sister Greta, tended to caricature on occasion rather than producing a more subtle display of arriviste (or should that be apparatchik?) menace. Another reservation was the way Unnur Ösp Stefánsdóttir as Greta, and Edda Arnljótsdóttir as Lucy the mother, delivered their lines when high emotion was called for. They screeched. I thought I was perhaps being unfair to them, but my friend with the tickets, who's blind and far more aurally adept than I am, said the same thing.
However, Björn Thors as Gregor was quite remarkable. He didn't so much act as climb - on walls, through windows, up stairs - in the way that a human-size beetle would. At the curtain I could see he was sweating profusely and breathing hard, and I was sitting in Row S in the Orchestra seats. Equally remarkable was the set. On the stage there was the quite ordinary dining room of a petite bourgeois family. Above that was Gregor's bedroom, though, and everything had been turned on its side so the audience could see a bed, a lamp, a rug, and so on as if they were looking down on it, rather like an entomologist examining a beetle. It worked another way too, first as a symbol for the way Gregor and his family's world has shifted, and second as an obvious metaphorical summation for loss, whether from domestic tragedy, politics or financial melt down, as the bed, the lamp, the rug and everything else are removed as the audience watches. Metamorphosis runs until March 9.
The narrative of Metamorphosis is well known: one morning the dutiful Gregor, the sole provider for his parents and sister, wakes up to discover he has turned into a giant beetle causing revulsion in his parents and eventually his sister. At just 85 minutes long - with no intermission - the play was nothing so much as a short, intense assault on the psyche whether one viewed it as a domestic tragedy or a metaphor for the coercion and cruelty of a totalitarian state. Or, much more intriguingly, a metaphor for Iceland's recent financial woes as the cast, with the exception of Tom Mannion, a graduate of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, were Icelandic: yes, Icelandic.
Not so long ago, certainly no more than 15 years or so, Iceland was a sort of Gregor-like place. Remote, largely unknown and placid (except for a protracted fishing dispute with Britain that started in the 1950s which the Fleet Street tabloids dubbed "the cod wars"). Then governments around the world started to deregulate their financial sectors, Iceland's among them, only to be broadsided by the recent international economic collapse that took the country's banks and plunged them into the freezing North Atlantic. Just as Gregor and his family woke up one day and found everything had changed overnight so too did Icelanders wake up to find their prosperous country had turned into the economic equivalent of a beetle.
All of the actors, with the exception of Tom Mannion as the father Herman, were rather too broad, rather too busy for my taste, and Víkingur Kristjánsson as Herr Fischer, the lodger to whom the parents want to rent a room and marry off Gregor's sister Greta, tended to caricature on occasion rather than producing a more subtle display of arriviste (or should that be apparatchik?) menace. Another reservation was the way Unnur Ösp Stefánsdóttir as Greta, and Edda Arnljótsdóttir as Lucy the mother, delivered their lines when high emotion was called for. They screeched. I thought I was perhaps being unfair to them, but my friend with the tickets, who's blind and far more aurally adept than I am, said the same thing.
However, Björn Thors as Gregor was quite remarkable. He didn't so much act as climb - on walls, through windows, up stairs - in the way that a human-size beetle would. At the curtain I could see he was sweating profusely and breathing hard, and I was sitting in Row S in the Orchestra seats. Equally remarkable was the set. On the stage there was the quite ordinary dining room of a petite bourgeois family. Above that was Gregor's bedroom, though, and everything had been turned on its side so the audience could see a bed, a lamp, a rug, and so on as if they were looking down on it, rather like an entomologist examining a beetle. It worked another way too, first as a symbol for the way Gregor and his family's world has shifted, and second as an obvious metaphorical summation for loss, whether from domestic tragedy, politics or financial melt down, as the bed, the lamp, the rug and everything else are removed as the audience watches. Metamorphosis runs until March 9.
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