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Metamorphosis (review)

Article in Theatre Journal · January 1998

DOI: 10.1353/tj.1998.0024

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Review
Author(s): Catherine Diamond
Review by: Catherine Diamond
Source: Theatre Journal, Vol. 50, No. 1, Theatre, Diaspora, and the Politics of Home (Mar.,
1998), pp. 114-116
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25068495
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114 / Performance Review
the second. The platform is bare?full of possibil
ity, but without defining features. Bright, uniform
light now issues from offstage sources removed
from the characters' world. Though part of the first
act was performed in Russian, Singer's family and
culture had provided space for his own linguistic
heritage (expressed here in Czech). Singer, how
ever, finds the recurrent English of the second act's
America incomprehensible, and as he loses his
son-in-law to war, his daughter to insanity, and his
wife to death through grief, he begins to lose his
language as well. Most importantly, he loses a
sense that the world bears any relationship to the
beliefs and concepts through which he once under
stood it.
The production's music and playing style trans
form what could have been a simple personal
tragedy into the type of communal event modem
theatre rarely achieves. Beside the island stage,
Martin Donnai conducts his own score through
woodwinds, strings, bells, and male and female
choruses of actors. Dohnal's short pieces of recited
text and lyrics drawn from the Old Testament lift
the modern action of Singer's trials out of the
mundane. His haunting and complex harmonies
and overlapping melodic lines, reminiscent of sa
cred songs, begin the play with a suggestion that
what will transpire both represents and transcends
retrospection, aspiring to a kind of evocation. The
matter-of-fact movement of the actors to the stage,
the playful, periodic exit of musicians through the
playing space, and other anti-illusionistic effects
fail to dispel this sense of evocation but, rather,
prove it to be grounded in something other than
mere illusion.
Director J. A. Pitinsk^'s staging amplifies this
dual sense of a ritualistic coming-into-being and of
collective memory by interlacing a naturalistic play
ing style with moments of expressionism. Mendel's
punishment of his children for their merciless teas
ing of Menuchim, for instance, is expressed by an
actor in the shadows whipping a switch through
the air. At the point of imaginary contact, Singer
claps his hands to his face, directing our attention
away from his children and onto the pain such
necessary punishment causes him. Pitinsky uses
such action at a distance and redirected focus to
express both the subjective and objective experi
ence of Mirjam's sexual adventurousness. As Rus
sian soldiers stamp to an accelerating beat in each
comer of the stage, Mirjam writhes, driven by their
tempo, atop a table and beneath a light she has set
swinging, which expressionistically elongates and
foreshortens her shadow.
Pitinsky's evocative/retrospective aesthetic, ex
pressive of both the characters' inner and "objec
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tive" experience, mirrors Singer's poetics and indi
cates a kind of faith. It is a faith implicit to the
modernist traditions upon which Pitinsky draws,
that some symbiosis or even causal relationship
exists between the interior and exterior worlds of
human being. Pitinsky captures this dual focus
throughout act one by setting characters at unnatu
ral distances or at oblique angles as they converse,
suggesting that they inhabit different but defined
spaces or that we view a single conversation
cubistically, simultaneously from two perspectives.
The disorientations, spatial unmappability, uni
form lighting, and sense of detachment from past
sources of meaning in the second act might be read,
in contrast, as an image of the loss of the modernist
project?whose humanistic content was once effec
tively deployed against a dehumanizing totalitari
anism.
The final moment, however, rises like an aria
against such disposable tendencies and reasserts a
faith in the relationship between inner and outer
realms. As two opera singers bring Dohnal's score
to an emotional peak, a cured and matured
Menuchim joins his bereft father in the new land.
In each other's arms, they lie on the bare stage
floor, bringing the whole oratorio to a point that
resolves yet, due to the accumulation of preceding
dissonances, defies resolution. It is a production
expressive of loss, but also suggestive, perhaps
most importantly for its enthusiastic Czech audi
ence, of a faith that makes its endurance possible.
DENNIS C. BECK
University of Texas, Austin
METAMORPHOSIS. By Franz Kafka. Adapted
by Steven Berkoff. Black Box Theatre Com
pany at Divadlo v Celetne, Prague. 21 July
1997.
Founded in 1991, the Black Box Theatre is the
oldest English-language theatre in Prague. In addi
tion to its season of contemporary American, En
glish, and Irish plays, over the past three years it
has been presenting a summer festival of Czech
works in English. Its production of Metamorphosis
characterizes its internationalizing of Czech theatre
within the precincts of Prague. Directed by Nancy
Bishop, the cast included American, English, and
Irish actors, while the set was done by Czech Jan
Hrusa. Berkoff brilliantly rendered Kafka's bleakly
comic masterpiece for the stage and the success of
this production rested primarily on the excellent
performance of Scott Bellefeuille in the key role of
Gregor Samsa, the traveling salesman who wakes
 PERFORMANCE REVIEW / 115

Greta Samsa (Orla Tuthill), Gregor Samsa (Tom OTeary), and Mrs. Samsa (Gail Fitzpatrick) in
Black Box Theatre Company of Prague's production of Kafka's Metamorphosis, adapted by Steven Berkoff,
directed by Nancy Bishop. O'Leary alternated with Scott Bellefeuille in the role of Samsa.
Divadlo v Celetne. Photo uncredited.

up one morning to discover he has been trans
formed into a cockroach. Stripped to dancer's tights,
Bellefeuille (who alternated the role with Tom
O'Leary) performed utterly convincing cockroach
contortions as he crouched with elbows extended
outward and perched on taut finger tips. More
over, he used Hrusa's stark set?a scaffolding cage
raised on a ramp serving as Samsa's bedroom?
with monkey-like agility, jumping sideways to
cling to the side bars or hang bat-like from the top.
Gregor would slither down the steep ramp toward
where the rest of his family members gathered on
stools or would beat a hasty retreat back up when
encountering their disgust. Thus Gregor remained
the center of attention, his presence constantly
hovering over the family.
Only Gregor occupied the cage except for the
climatic action of his father's rage. After the depar
ture of their lodger who was to supply them with a
replacement income, Mr. Samsa rushes into the
cage as Gregor scrambles downstage to escape
him. From his superior height, however, Mr. Samsa
throws an apple at his son's back, which remains
embedded and, rotting away, eventually kills him.
The horror of the moment was particularly graphic
because Bellefeuille, at the edge of the stage, stared
straight into the audience as the apple struck.
Moreover, while his body held its cockroach pose,
his wide-eyed expression of amazement, sorrow,
and incomprehension made him appear uncannily
like the young Kafka himself. This superimposition
of the two images was arresting?as if Kafka's
ghost haunted the production.
Greta, Gregor's sister, played by Orla Tuthill, is
at first the most sympathetic to his plight, but later
vehemently turns against him when her desire for
normalcy overcomes the last vestiges of her love.
Tuthill and Gail Fitzpatrick as Mrs. Samsa played
their roles with moving conviction, their stylized
gestures for the most part smoothly alternating
with their characters' direct emotional expressions.
Robert Orr was less comfortable with his role as
Mr. Samsa perhaps because of the unabashed ha
tred Kafka poured into the father's character; the
emotion overwhelmed the stylized manner of the
production. Orr's difficulty was evident in contrast

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116 / Performance Review

with the long-legged Tim O'Leary who played the be. With frightening clarity, we see how easy it is
senior clerk, Gregor's boss, who, with comically for them to sacrifice him, having once stripped him
large but determined strides, arrives to tell him of human and familial identification. As Gregor
that his absence from work will imperil his job. himself assumes more of his cockroach persona, it
O'Leary successfully combined the clich?d bureau becomes harder for us to insist on his humanity.
cratic behavior of dehumanized mechanical move His pathetic death is the victory of his complicity
ment and clipped fixed speech patterns with the with fate, his own sense of unworthiness to which
demands of the narrative that was both comic and his family is only too willing for him to succumb.
terrifying in its indifference to human individual
Writing of Kafka, Milan Kundera has suggested
ity. More representative and less personal than the
that totalitarian states reduce people to functionar
father, O'Leary played this cruelty with tight con
ies in an incomprehensibly abstract world. Black
trol so that the character both complied with the
Box's production demonstrated that Kafka's mes
mannerism of Berkoff's rendition while still being
sage remains potent in post-Soviet Prague.
totally convincing.
CATHERINE DIAMOND
The family members had more complex psychol
ogy and thus the mechanical movement was less Soochow University-Taipei
easily integrated. They tended to engage in group
sequences serving as a chorus to Gregor's direct
narration. Bishop followed Berkoff's directives re THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL GOMBRO
garding the set with its stark pools of light and lack WICZ FESTIVAL. Radom, Poland. 11-15
of props so that the actors mimed everything. She June 1997.
interpreted his call for formal suggestive move
ment that reduces the naturalistic stage activity,
The Third International Gombrowicz Festival,
pointing to and emphasizing the emotions beneath
the narrative, but there was some unevenness in hosted biennially by Teatr Powszechny in Radom,
concluded its program with the screening of a film
how the movement was employed. The play un
interview with Witold Gombrowicz, the exiled
folds initially with a pre-cockroach review of their
Polish writer whose works inspired this extraordi
lives that Gregor narrates and to which the others
nary five-day event. In contrast to the Festival's
respond with stylized movement illustrating his
many audacious and provocative performances of
speech, such as dashing with their stools around
the playwright's works, the film by the French
each other in their panic of his losing his job. At
television journalist Michel Polac, shot shortly be
other times, the movement was more gratuitous
fore the writer's death in France in 1969, showed us
and distracting. Bishop, who played the would-be
a slightly built, tormented man, whose acerbity
lodger herself, had the greatest difficulty integrat
reflected his long years of struggle for survival and
ing the movement. Executing more ambitious som
recognition. Gombrowicz explained his persistent
ersaults, she portrayed the lodger as a circus clown,
avoidance of eye contact to his interviewer as
pushing the mechanical responses beyond the ap
shyness and a fear of others?a startling admission
propriate limits of the character.
from a person whose writing has so boldly de
Costumed in layers of postmodern black with bunked Polish traditions. However modest this
ragged hints of bourgeois prurience by Pavlina explanation may seem, it echoed Gombrowicz's
McEchnroe, the characters also wore modified talent for provocation. It indeed provoked a desire
whiteface makeup, thus integrating the stark ab to penetrate the fa?ade?to see what lies behind the
straction of the set with both a contemporary aes sadly grimacing and mask-like face that appeared
thetic and the approximation of Kafka's own time, on the screen.
or as Berkoff suggests, the Victoriana found in old
The Festival presented a total of seven produc
prints. The almost naked humanity of Gregor con tions of Gombrowicz's works, of which three in
trasted with the overdressing of the others as well
particular stood out: Attorney Kroykowski's Dancer,
as highlighted the clean lines of his own move
an adaptation of a short story presented by Radom's
ments, making his cockroach persona all that more
Teatr Powszechny; Hamburg's Deutsches Schau
compelling.
spielhaus's production of Ivona, Princess of Bur
Although Mr. Samsa is unredeemed in his ha gundia; and the Replika Theatre Company of
tred of his son, the two female characters reveal Stockholm's adaptation of Operetta. Other offerings
more conflict between their initial sympathy for included A Feast at Countess Kotlubay's, the first
Gregor and their later rejection of him, persuading English-language adaptation of one of Gombro
themselves that he has become what he appears to wicz's short stories, brought to Radom by The

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