Everyone knows the opening to Kafka's novella The Metamorphosis. Notoriously, a salesman named Gregor Samsa wakes up one day and can't get up – he has seemingly been transformed into a giant upturned insect. What follows is a modernist tale about isolation and the absurdity of life, as our central character wastes away. He has devoted his life to his family but failed at his goal of supporting them. Ultimately, the message is about how people often feel that they are not accepted for who they truly are. It is a solemn tale, and one that many theatre companies would avoid touching with a bargepole due to the enormity of its reputation.
This fear was one that was held by Frantic Assembly's artistic director Scott Graham, who says the ‘baggage and expectation around it’ was enough of a deterrent. If it hadn't been for his colleague and friend Frazer Ayers, this new approach to the text may never have emerged. Ayers spoke to Graham on a personal level, claiming that the story was ‘ripe for a retelling’, hosting a plot that resonated with many working-class people of colour. This shifted the perspective Graham initially had about the text, and so a thrilling new production rolled into being with a selection of astounding creatives recruited to take part.
The approach
In the drama classroom and beyond the title The Metamorphosis is often swiftly followed by one name: Stephen Berkoff. His 1969 adaptation of the story is extremely literal, produced creatively with physical theatre. Of course, it is also accompanied by an excellent recording of the stage production in 1989, making it the perfect case study for drama educators to refer to. Berkoff and Kafka both came from middle-class Jewish families, had strained relationships with their fathers, and they both dreamed of working in the arts despite their families' wishes. These similarities meant that Berkoff's approach to this text specifically is extremely true to the author, exploring the degradation and transformative power of alienation with an enormous focus on the animalisation of Gregor through physical theatre.
Frantic Assembly has taken a completely fresh approach to the text, focusing instead on the experience Gregor has of being a mixed-heritage race man and (in the words of the artistic director) ‘the experience of being defined by others as either too white for some rooms and too black for other rooms – something that was never through his own definition’. This specific adaption focuses on how powerful perception is in defining others, and making the transformation that happens more realist, rather than absurd. ‘With Stephen Berkoff I found more similarities than I expected in terms of what we both thought were important elements of the text. But stylistically we were very different,’ reinforces Graham.
Living up to expectations and rebelling against them
‘The expectation is there because people know how it starts. They know there is a transformation and they expect it to be an insect,’ says Graham. ‘It is all very literal, and it forgets that the novel was allegorical, and it is extremely clever.’ Part of the play's cleverness comes from the way it is still taken literally by so many audience members, despite the true nature of the allegory being much more subtle and malleable than that. This is something that Graham loves to play with, claiming that they had to make it ‘their own version’. The first step here was to find the right collaborator.
Throughout Frantic's process it was always clear that this would be a textual adaptation, and that words were a crucial element. There was a point in time where Graham claims he would have ‘settled for a safe pair of hands’, but as soon as creative Lemn Sissay was brought up, the team knew that was the experimental direction they wanted to go in.
This could never have been a ‘flat’ retelling, because the English text was already translated form the original German. That is crucial, because in some translations Gregor transforms into a ‘giant insect’, whereas in others he transforms into a ‘giant vermin’. These words have completely different meanings and hugely different implications. ‘There's something so definitive about insects that you can almost dismiss this in the text – it's absurd,’ says Graham. ‘But “vermin” opens up connotations of waste and disgust in society. It impact people to have vermin, and it highlights to me how important words are in this production.’
The message
For many students attending the show, this will be their first experience of how theatre can be a political act. We are all acutely aware that the arts have been squeezed in schools in recent years. Mirroring this, one of the most violent acts in The Metamorphosis – in both the production and the novella – is the dismantling of Greya and her aspirations to play the violin. In turn, the story reflects our relationship with money and debt.
‘It is a very poetic piece, visually and textually, but at its heart is very much true to the novella and the fire within that writing,’ agrees Graham. ‘There is a metamorphism here about changing from breadwinner to burden. This is a huge thing that is happening currently across the UK and it has a giant impact on families as people are adapting and changing.’
‘Young people should feel comfortable enough to try and fail. I think the opposite is deathly’
Movement in arts education
Despite the topic of the production being rather bleak, Graham's process with the Frantic Assembly team is a joyful one. He emphasises throughout every creative process that all young people should be aware of the amount of times they ‘failed’ or ‘tested’ things in the rehearsal room. ‘This is something that I have been banging the drum about for a long time – the freedom to fail and the encouragement to fail.’
‘When I see how students are encouraged to present the work that they want to make and talk about the process, I feel that it doesn't allow for accidents. It doesn't always allow for getting things wrong, falling over and getting up again, or finding out you were wrong and then finding something completely new. That is how I make work and that is the best part about going into a rehearsal room.’ All teachers know that failure allows for discovery and for inspiration in the strangest of places, but assessing and rewarding that in our current system is difficult.
Moments of trial and error
One of the most exhilirating moments of Graham's career was when he was in the rehearsal room for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, he tells me. ‘I wasn't extremely experienced then, and I went into the room thinking everyone was going to think I shouldn't be there,’ he says. The air of the room changed when the director, Marianne Elliot was looking at one moment and said simply ‘I don't know what to do here’. By holding her hands up and having the honesty to say she didn't know what to do, she invited other collaborators to step forward and make an offer, meaning that Graham could contribute.
‘Despite the fact that she is a multi-award-winning creative, she still felt like she could be honest in that moment. I think about that moment quite a lot and I think for young people coming into the industry they should know that you don't have to hide behind this notion that you know everything.’ Graham reassures young people that putting your hand up and saying you don't know is absolutely vital: ‘it is not a declaration of weakness; it is an invitation to those around you for help and they will appreciate it. I think the opposite is deathly, if you pretend you know everything.’
With such a breadth of experience in physical theatre, it is worth listening to Graham's advice for students wishing to work in the industry. ‘Be open, be kind, be energetic’, he says. ‘Treat every opportunity in a rehearsal room as a chance to find out something you don't know, rather than prove what you do know.’