By rights, Matthew Lenton and Vanishing Point theatre
company should have already opened their new production of The Metamorphosis in
Italy prior to a short tour of Scotland that begins in Glasgow next week at the
Tron Theatre in Glasgow. As it is, the show’s run at the VIE Festival in Cesana
in conjunction with their European partners, the Emilia Romagna Teatro
Fondazione, had the plug pulled on it before anyone left Scotland.
The postponement of The Metamorphosis isn’t, however, an
early casualty of Brexit, although such consequences are likely to affect
international artistic exchanges soon enough. Rather, Vanishing Point have been
grounded due to uncertainties surrounding the Coronavirus currently sweeping
the globe, with the Italian government requesting the cancellation of all
festivals in their country over the next few weeks as a precautionary measure.
All of which seems a strangely fitting back-story to Lenton
and Vanishing Point’s new take on Franz Kafka’s seminal story about a young
office worker who wakes up one morning to discover himself transformed into a
giant insect. For Lenton, it’s been a long time coming.
“We talked about doing The Metamorphosis years ago,” he
says. “I'd read it when I was younger, and I remember being weirdly
underwhelmed by it. But we were talking to the Italian company who I’d worked
with before on a version of 1984 about doing something else with them, and I
thought, with the atmosphere and darkness of it, Metamorphosis really should be
my cup of tea.”
Lenton’s response to Kafka’s story when he re-read it was a
completely different experience.
“It made me think about what it must have been like to be
Jewish in Germany before the Second World War,” he says, “when gradually you
realise that something's happening that’s not only alienating you from society,
but is making you an object of persecution because you are what you are. People
are moved from their homes into ghettos, and you get to the point of absolute
horror and isolation, where you realise that there is no way out. That’s what
Gregor’s journey is like, and I started to think about how easy it is for people
to become alienated, but also, I became more interested in how easy it is for
everyone else to alienate and marginalise someone because of the differences of
that person.
“The interesting thing about The Metamorphosis for me isn't
the fact that Gregor’s metamorphosis has happened at the beginning. The real
metamorphosis is what happens to everybody else around him in response to it.
Gregor’s an insect, and it's not necessarily a problem at the beginning, He
could be an insect that everyone cares for and goes, okay, that's different,
let's try and deal with it, and be empathetic towards this thing.
“That sort of happens at the beginning, then gradually it
changes until everyone's behaviour towards Gregor starts to become scarier, and
gradually his world disappears and he ends up dying because of the way everyone
else begins to treat him differently. That incremental transformation is the
thing that's really interesting to me, how people go, okay I can deal with
this, there's no problem. But then, for one reason or another, your behaviour
towards someone starts to change until you find ways of excusing your behaviour,
and at its worst, persecuting people.”
There are clear references to the current plight of refugees
and asylum seekers here. This is likely to be heightened by having Gregor played
by Italian actor Nico Guerzoni, whose dialogue in an otherwise English-speaking
production will be in Italian. This should have different resonances depending
on which country the show is being performed.
“When the family wake up and see Gregor, they see someone
who's turned into a beetle, but they also see someone who's not from their country.
In Italy, seeing the only actor speaking Italian gradually alienated by
everybody else will be interesting, and here it's going to be the opposite, with
the only person who doesn't speak English being the outsider.”
In this sense, The Metamorphosis addresses Vanishing Point’s
very existence as an international company. As Lenton observes, “Doing The
Metamorphosis now comes at a fascinating time, because we've just come out of
the European Union at a time time we're collaborating with a company that's
based in the European Union. So, for this show to happen, as well as this particular
story to happen as an international co-production, and as a cultural
collaboration, is really interesting. On one level, it's very much about
celebrating internationalism, but it's also about exploring the tensions of
internationalism.”
Coronavirus and Brexit aside, Lenton fully intends
Vanishing Point to keep on evolving.
“It's always been really important to us that we that we
work internationally, and that we're an international company based in
Scotland. And I really hope that that that we’ll continue to be able to do
that. Even though it becomes harder, and perhaps even because it's harder, it's
an even better reason to try to celebrate internationalism, and hopefully not
wake up one morning as a beetle. It always seems to be such a failure of the
imagination to not be able to put yourself in the place of the other.”
Vanishing Point’s production of The Metamorphosis opens at
the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, March 10-21, then tours to the Traverse theatre,
Edinburgh, April 1-4; Dundee Rep, April 9-11; Eden Court, Inverness, April
15-17. Metamorphosis Unplugged will tour later in the year.
The Herald, March 2nd 2020
ends
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