It is linguistically playful, politically needling and gives the actors long speeches to sink their teeth into. But Lemn Sissay’s version of the Franz Kafka novella is also low on narrative tension. It is more poetic than dramatic.
The playwright is initially drawn to the theme of transformation. Where Gregor Samsa (Felipe Pacheco) is a fabric salesman, offering his customers reinvention through fashion, his sister Grete (Hannah Sinclair Robinson) is transitioning through adolescence, trying out catwalk poses and playing with her appearance. It is a fertile idea in a story about a man who turns into an insect, but one Sissay discards. Taking over is a view of Gregor as a manifestation of the ills of capitalism.
Like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Gregor buckles under the pressure of a merciless market. On the face of it, his family reject him because of his appearance, but their real complaint is his failure to stay economically active. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” is the mantra of Gregor’s father (Troy Glasgow), owning his exploitation like a badge of pride, with the apparent approval of Mrs Samsa (Louise Mai Newberry).
As the insect-man, Pacheco writhes, convulses and stretches. He swings from the ceiling and vanishes into the furniture. But having hit a peak of terror early in the show, he has nowhere to go. We might admire his agility but have no time to empathise with his predicament before it consumes him.
There are times when Scott Graham’s Frantic Assembly production, performed on Jon Bausor’s set with its dreamily distorted angles and porous walls, seems less like a play than an art installation, abstractly riffing on the book. The director’s physical-theatre techniques are good for providing expressionist angst, but too often pad out the material to create, at over two hours, a lengthy adaptation.
In a script with more telling than showing, Gregor’s family background becomes clear only in the second half, too late to appreciate what has been lost. The backward-looking nature of this material makes the direction of travel uncertain. All the same, some combination of Kafka’s haunting tale and the tireless movement of Graham’s production keeps a packed matinee audience of teenagers in rapt silence.
At Curve, Leicester, until 23 September. Touring until 2 March.
