Tom Charge Burke
posted 25 October 2006

Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find he has turned into an insect. At first, life as a hexapod offers him a winning combination of unemployability and acrobatic prowess, a joyful release from the drudgery of life as a salesman. However the sympathy of his family does not last long as his embarrassing condition inhibits their social progress. When old man Samsa misses out on an initiation to the 'hunting lodge', Gregor must take his fate into his own hands in order not to burden his family for any longer.

It is easy to treat difficult, enigmatic stories with a deferential austerity that pays no tribute to the humanity of their creator. Thankfully David Farr and Gísli Örn Garðarsson employ a beautifully judged sense of humour and simplicity that renders the work gloriously engaging and heartbreakingly relevant. At the offing Gregor's transformation is greeted with a clownish display of revulsion that sets a tone that encourages the audience to enjoy the giant leaps of imagination that the plot requires, rather than worry about whether or not they understand what it all means. Gregor's mutation is no hallowed, historic metaphor but an act of nature: cruel, mysterious and inexplicable.

The production values are of the highest order. The soundtrack, composed by Nick Cave and long-time collaborator Warren Ellis, suffuses the production with a seductive sweetness that teeters between the voice of a cradle-rocking mother and that of a Siren luring us to our deaths upon the dashing rocks. Gísli Örn Garðarsson's ingenious physical characterisation of Gregor offers an exhilarating display of physical possibility, but his mysteriously upturned bedroom soon becomes his prison rather than his playground. We soon discover that the seductive and the destructive are never far apart.

I left with two thoughts ringing in my mind; the first was: 'What a life affirming evening! Isn't it great to be young and free?', and the second: 'Perhaps I'll head back home and hang myself; after all I must be an awful worry to my parents'. Somehow the two thoughts didn't seem to contradict one another. On the one hand Gregor's story might be read as one of repressed youth struggling to express itself, and ultimately destroyed by its community in order to maintain the status quo; a story about repression, about Fascism, about the Holocaust. On the other hand it is a story about a hard working family who don't deserve to have their aspirations dashed by the selfish actions of their first-born.

On the third hand it might be read as a study of physical self loathing. On the fourth it is an existentialist analogy. Four hands? The outlandish simplicity of Kafka's premise defies any attempt to impose an absolute interpretation. Two hands certainly aren't enough. Nor are six. David Farr and Gísli Örn Garðarsson's great achievement is that they do not simply challenge the hypocrisy of the establishment, but that they also offer a chance to sympathise with it. In doing so they open a discourse far darker and more humane than the standard anti-establishment critique.

Till 28 October 2006