Lemn Sissay’s latest collection of poetry is a kind of celebration of light, filled with verse written at the break of dawn over the course of a decade. It’s coming out soon, but right now he’s sitting in a windowless rehearsal room, working through the daylight hours on a new production of Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka’s dark tale of a man who changes into a huge insect.
Staged by Frantic Assembly and adapted by Sissay into a richly lyrical script, this morning’s rehearsal, taking place at the Lyric Hammersmith in London, is going over the opening sequence. It’s a swirl of movement: Felipe Pacheco, playing Gregor Samsa, the unfortunate man who transforms, springs and weaves around the stage while Hannah Sinclair Robinson, playing his sister Grete, lifts him off the ground.
The athletic flow of movement is typical for a company known for its physicality. Sissay is delighted to be here, not least because he has been a longtime fan of Frantic Assembly, watching its plays and attending its after-show Q&As across the country over many years. “He’s wearing the T-shirt,” whispers artistic director, Scott Graham, mischievously. “Yes, I’ve literally got the T-shirt,” whoops Sissay, pointing to the black-and-white top he is wearing with the company’s name emblazoned across it.
It was Graham – the director of this production, which is about to open at the Theatre Royal in Plymouth before touring – who first came to Sissay with the idea. “I looked at the novella,” says the writer, “and thought, ‘I’m in’ on reading it. But really, it was Frantic Assembly that buzzed my buttons on the whole thing.” While Sissay has published numerous plays alongside his celebrated poetry, Graham “plucked up the courage to ask Lemn” because he did not want a straightforward adaptation, but something more left-field and provocative instead. “A good collaboration,” he says, “is a ‘What if …’. It was kind of important that Lemn wasn’t a playwright with 30 plays under his belt – someone who’d say, ‘Leave it to me.’ I thought this was about the two of us working it out together.”
Kafka’s absurdist tale, whose protagonist is unable to go to work due to his sudden, shocking metamorphosis, is very much a story for today, they say. “This is about modern living,” says Graham, “and an economic system which invites you into debt and then squeezes you. The moment you can’t pay it back, you’re not worth anything. Gregor is dealing with the pressure to provide for his family but also to repay debt.”
Sissay, who is of Ethiopian heritage and has spoken about his experience of growing up in Britain’s care system, thinks the story is as much about pressures on the family, economic and otherwise. “This family is being eaten. They are being devoured and they cannibalise themselves as well – feeding off each other.”
In the past, Sissay has said dysfunction is a part of the function of family and stands by that now. “It’s part of the beauty of family actually,” he says. Kafka’s novella, he believes, is specifically a story about a family under immense pressure and the dysfunctions that arise out of that. “Under pressure, we turn on each other or something snaps,” says Graham, while Sissay adds: “It’s happening now. More kids are going into care. People are having to provide care for their family members.”
Samsa’s transformation and its impact on the family is not the only point of focus here, though. There is also the story of Grete, an aspiring violinist who must step into a caring role once her brother becomes incapacitated. Through her, says Graham, the play explores the role of the artist – those who can afford to make art and others who are discouraged from doing so. There is a moment when a lodger the family takes in to generate more income laughs at Grete’s violin-playing.
“That’s when the violence of the economic structure becomes really clear,” adds Graham. “What is shown to be ridiculous is someone like Grete holding a violin. That’s when the family realise the system is crushing them. I’m from a working-class background and that’s why it struck a chord with me. Look at our education system and the way that the arts are being devalued in such an insidious way. What they’re doing is teaching the working classes to devalue the arts themselves. It’s a different thing from your Eddie Redmaynes [educated at Eton] or those from that background who are encouraged to make art.”
Does this class bias feed into the idea that artists work for the love of their art rather than the money – and has Sissay ever been asked to work for nothing? “I often get asked but I don’t do it. I find it funny that people think we should work for free, just for the love of it. I get people who assume – because they assume the arts is a luxury – that you have another life and the art is what you do on the side.”
As for creativity, Sissay thinks its scope goes way beyond the arts. “We devalue creativity by thinking it’s only in the arts. It’s in lots of other places. There is a freedom in being creative and people are frightened of that. I think that’s one of the reasons they keep it away from the working classes. I believe a hairdresser deserves to love their job just as much as a writer deserves to love theirs – and be paid rightly for it. A hairdressers is quite possibly the most creative place on the high street. Creativity is not the monopoly of the artist.”
Or of those who consider themselves artists, adds Graham. Frantic Assembly’s youth-based Ignition project was born out of this blurring of boundaries in the mid-2000s. The initiative was initially a response to the fact that there were so few young men coming into theatre. “We realised there was a cultural problem,” says Graham, “in that they felt it wasn’t for them.”
Graham’s own background attests to this reluctance. Born and raised in Corby, near Northampton, he studied English at Swansea University but was too scared to give theatre a go. “In my third year, I was playing football for the first team when I plucked up the courage to join the drama society. I kept the two worlds completely apart but I was using the skills of one within the other, such as balance and strength. It made me think of potential crossover everywhere – of people who are too scared to come into the arts or haven’t thought about it. So we went to boxing clubs, rugby clubs, parkour and youth clubs. We held workshops because what some people think is theatre might not be the reality.”
In Graham and Sissay’s hands, the story of Gregor Samsa is one that explores masculinity too, in particular how it intersects with capitalism, patriarchy, mental health and breakdown. “It’s about what the patriarchal structure does to men,” says Graham. It is not just about the love or hate of work, adds Sissay, but about the burden of being a breadwinner. “I grew up in a mining town,” continues the writer, “and the miners didn’t like going in the mines. Mines were shitholes, horrible places to work in – but they would fight for the right to work there.” The hardest thing for a man in that situation, says Graham, is to put his head above the parapet and say: “I don’t want to do this.”
But do they think masculinity is evolving? Is that why we talk about a crisis of masculinity? “I don’t know when there’s not been a crisis of masculinity,” says Sissay. “Go back to the 1960s, the 50s, the 20s. Go back to the Ted Hugheses. Did men ever get it right?”
Graham cites the infamous 2022 Oscars ceremony incident in which Will Smith slapped Chris Rock. “That moment when [Smith] laughs at [Rock’s] joke and then turns round to his wife [to see that] she isn’t laughing. It’s as if he goes, ‘Oh fuck. I’m going to have to do something now.’ He’s doomed from the moment he sees his wife isn’t laughing.”
Despite all the soul-searching around modern-day masculinity, Graham believes there are still immovable expectations regarding what a man has to do. He remembers first hearing about the invasion of Ukraine, of women and children being evacuated and men being picked out of queues to fight. “There’s no wobble at all. It’s not a choice. Men are aware of that on a certain level. Are they brave enough to say, ‘That’s not fair’? They don’t say it. They bury it. That’s where Gregor and his father are trapped. That’s their paralysis.”
Metamorphosis is at Theatre Royal Plymouth from 11 September, then touring until 2 March 2024. Let the Light Pour In: Morning Poems by Lemn Sissay is published by Canongate on 21 September.
