Tron
Theatre, Glasgow
Five
stars
Franz
Kafka’s story about a young man called Gregor Samsa, who wakes up one morning
to find himself transformed into a giant insect, could have been tailor-made
for Vanishing Point. Under the guidance of director Matthew Lenton, the company’s
penchant for dark visual poetry is at a premium in this new theatricalisation
of Kafka’s tale.
Lenton
and his team have turned Gregor’s existential drudgery into an exquisitely
realised portrait of what happens when you push someone into a corner enough to
dehumanise them from a system they can no longer bear. While it stays true to Kafka’s
original, it’s the fear and loathing of those around Gregor that counts.
As
scripted by Lenton with the cast, the play has Gregor a slave to the gig
economy, whose self-isolation in his bedroom sees him change overnight. This is
no sulky teen painting their walls black, but a cry from the dark that no-one
around him understands. As his life goes into lockdown, Gregor’s room becomes a
cage, and he a prisoner, with his family forced to serve the wealthy while he goes
cold turkey, scrambling around for scraps in the dirt.
In a
co-production with the Tron and Italian partners, Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione,
having Gregor played by two actors, Sam Stopford and Nico Guerzoni, is a stroke
of genius. Cowering on Kenneth MacLeod’s stark but sleek set illuminated by
slashes of Simon Wilkinson’s lighting design, Guerzoni speaks in Italian, while
his uncomprehending family stick with their own kind, their uniforms giving
them the misplaced authority of guards. With Mark Melville’s brooding electronic
underscore ramping up the intensity, this brings home the everyday hysteria
that exists in a Brexit-scarred, Covid-19 consumed landscape where the likes of
Gregor are treated as animals or aliens.
Wearing
increasingly filthy pyjamas, Guerzoni resembles an inmate in Belsen, Guantanamo
or any migrant holding station right here on our doorstep. This makes for a searing
and devastatingly realised meditation on what it means to be a foreign body in
an increasingly terrified world.
The Herald, March 15th 2020
ends
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