The Joyce Theater
September 18, 2013
by Kathleen O’Connell
copyright © 201 by Kathleen O’Connell
"The insect itself cannot be depicted. It cannot even be shown from a distance." So Franz Kafka wrote to his publisher in 1915 when he learned that Ottomar Starke had been hired to illustrate the title page of "The Metamorphosis." Starke complied with Kafka’s wishes, but they’ve been cheerfully ignored by artists and directors—not to mention Vladimir Nabokov—ever since. U.K.–based choreographer Arthur Pita’s prize-winning 2011 adaption, commissioned by the Royal Opera House and now on view at the Joyce, is but the latest attempt to bring Gregor Samsa from page to stage.
And boy, does Pita ever try to depict the insect. It’s no small task to render lithe, long-limbed, and starkly elegant Royal Ballet Principal Edward Watson repellant, but both choreographer and dancer have thrown themselves at the challenge with a fierce resolve. For over an hour Watson, who portrays Gregor, ratchets his slime-smeared body into impossible, inhuman shapes while a dark ooze drips down the all-white set’s walls and glazes the floor.
It’s no small task to transmute Kafka’s prose into effective theater, either. In the novella, Gregor’s unexplained transformation into a giant insect is reported in a straightforward, matter-of-fact tone so detached as to be nearly clinical. The disconnect between the horror of its premise and the dispassion of the telling is what gives the story its lasting power.
Pita is faithful to many of Kafka’s details, but presents them with an extravagant theatricality that’s the mirror opposite of the original’s restraint. It’s overkill, and it’s reductive. Watson’s commitment to the role is deeply affecting, but the depiction of Gregor’s insect misery is so relentless and extreme that becomes a thing in itself rather than a means to tell a story. It holds the eye rather than the imagination: first you marvel at Watson’s astonishing physicality; ten minutes later you’re wondering what all that guck is (it’s molasses) and how the hell the stage crew is going to get it cleaned up before the next show.
When the audience enters the theater, the curtain is already up and the performers are in position on Simon Daw’s canny unit set, which has been split down the middle to suggest two distinct rooms. We’re still in Kafka’s Mitteleuropa, but the setting has been updated to the early 50’s. To the left, Gregor lies still and prone in a small iron bed, tucked in under a tidy white sheet. To the right, his family is gathered around a plain white table in a mid-century kitchen. Mother (Nina Goldman) sews; Father (Anton Skrzypiciel) reads the paper; sister Grete (Corey Annand) does her homework on the floor. Frank Moore’s score can be heard in the background. Here it’s a collage of Slavic chatter and a sad little melody Moore plays live on his violin. Later, in obedience to the immutable law of the theater that eye-popping effects must be accompanied by ear-splitting sound, it will swell to a grinding roar.
Kafka begins his tale with Gregor’s transformation; Pita begins with a depiction of the mechanical sameness of Gregor’s pre-bug existence as a traveling salesman. It’s concise, clever, and the best part of the show. The alarm goes off, Gregor gets dressed, and, moving like an automaton, grabs a quick coffee from the cheery blonde pushing the drinks trolley at the train station. (She’s one of the roles played by Bettina Carpi, a stage animal if there ever was one. Carpi nearly walks off with the show as the Samsas’ voluble cleaning woman.) He buys a slivovitz from the same blonde on the return trip, eats a sober dinner with his family, and goes to bed. The cycle is repeated thrice; the only variety in the dreary routine is a rainy day.
On the fourth go-round, the alarm clock rings and rings. When the stage lights finally go up, we see Watson rocking on his back. His arms and legs are in the air, fingers and toes wriggling like feelers: it’s Gregor transformed into an insect. The palette of movement that Watson and Pita have devised for Gregor the bug is alien, repellant, and fascinating in exactly the same way that a real insect’s movements are. Watson’s sharply angled limbs cross his body where they shouldn’t, then slowly straighten and circle around it in seeming independence from anything that might be called a center of gravity. His abdomen arches and curls; his splayed fingers and long, preternaturally flexible toes are in constant motion like maxillae. And there’s the dark slime he deposits on everything he crawls over, including his mother.
But as observant and inventive as they are, Watson’s contortions are limited in their effect. We see all of the insect that Gregor has become, but little of the human that he yet remains. Kafka’s protagonist is a true chimera, both bug and man. He likes hanging from the ceiling and wedging himself under the sofa, but he’s also big on problem-solving and reflects with pride on his former status as breadwinner. And despite the torment of his isolation, he’s determined to be considerate of his family’s disgust. Pita’s Gregor is a chimera too, but one reduced to insect weirdness and human anguish. Even his duets with his mother and sister tell us more about them than about him.
Pita does better with Gregor’s family: we’re shown the arc of their progress from shock, to disgust, indifference, and finally, hostility. They begin to echo Gregor’s movements, especially Grete. Pita makes her an aspiring ballerina rather than a violinist; the better (and more beautiful) she gets, the more she moves like Gregor and the more she loathes the sight of him. By the time she’s on pointe, her extensions are as freakish as his and her tendus have the fury of a cockroach’s hisses—a suggestion, perhaps, that she’s grown as repellant on the inside as he has on the outside.
Some of Pita’s departures from the text are inspired; some are merely grating; some do actual violence to the original. Three dream figures sheathed in black and a layer of slime descend into Gregor’s room and kick him around in a Grand Guignol of goo and torment. It’s not clear why Pita put them there except to dial the horror up to eleven. At one point, there’s a strong suggestion that Gregor’s father has begun to make sexual advances towards Grete; it feels like lazy shorthand for depravity. Worst of all, the Samsa's three bearded lodgers have been morphed into caricatures of shtetl Jews who make like Tevye. The family joins them in a jolly hora. Oy. How tone deaf can Pita be? If this is Mitteleuropa in the early 50s, these Jews would long since have been dispatched to their fate.
The cheap joke walks over one of the novella’s most poignant scenes and its moment of crisis. In the original, Grete plays her violin for the three lodgers, but they drift away in boredom. Gregor perceives that he alone is moved by her playing, and, tempted by the realization that he is more than a beast and the fantasy that she will willingly join him in his prison, leaves his room to approach her. When the lodgers see him, all hell breaks loose and he must listen to Grete announce that for everyone’s sake he’s got to be disposed of. He returns to his room, his thoughts still full of love, and allows himself to die. Pita’s retelling does little more than show Gregor isolated from the fun that everyone else is having as they dance around the kitchen.
Despite its flaws as a rendition of Kafka’s famous tale, the show is still worth seeing. Watson’s performance is a genuine tour-de-force; it doesn’t just bowl you over—it makes you long to see him again, and soon. The other performers more than hold their own thanks to their exemplary dedication, technical polish, and attention to matters of craft both large and small. It’s clear that Pita, his performers, and his production team have done more than read the Cliff Notes. But through the necessity of depicting what Kafka thought best left to the imagination, they’ve been tempted into an extravagance of expression that’s at odds with the original—and tells us less.
copyright © 2013 by Kathleen O’Connell
Photos by Tristram Kenton
Top: Edward Watson in “The Metamorphosis”
Bottom: Nina Goldman and Edward Watson in “The Metamorphosis