Metamorphosis – White Version | Franz Kafka

Under the auspices of the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Athens With the Support of the Museum of Political Exiles – Ai Stratis.

Zero Point Theatre Group is an associate theatre company of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture.

The play’s translation is published by the Nefeli publications.

Metamorphosis and the game of the broken mirrors

“Our art consists in being dazzled by the truth; The light upon the grotesque mask as it shrinks back is true, and nothing else”

Franz Kafka

A night’s restless dreams lead to the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa, merchant representative, into an enormous repulsive insect… However, what has really happened to him? What does this metamorphosis mean to us and how literally are we able to perceive it?

The unclean Gregor Samsa can only be described as a modern… Service-providing man in a “heartless and soulless world” (Marx), a persona in a dreadful clown parade, wandering through family, professional and other socially imposed labyrinths, a man-product of alien (and alienated) desires and images of the others, hovering over a void network of an absent self…

The very moment the machine-Gregor Samsa renders dysfunctional, he starts seeing himself as an enormous repulsive insect. He renounces what is left of his human characteristics, adopting the anticipated image, imposed by his close relatives and his professional entourage. We might as well say that he actually convinces himself to transform into that disgusting creature, into the most repugnant form of what the others believe he is or he should be. He is, then, gradually captured into that prison of that specific image, of how the others see him, introjecting it and trying to find means of communication through it. Naturally, the others do absolutely nothing to release him from that new situation that he finds himself in. His metamorphosis only comes to confirm how they see him. In fact, they accept this new form, thus making the bonds –that they, but also himself, have chosen for him – even stronger, and they continue until the death of this de-humanized creature.

Our hero, however, had had the chance to develop the possibilities of the assimilation of himself-and-the-world into a specific distorted (as well as distorting) family-and-social environment, full of guilt and fear, regarding not only him, but also the others. Yet, the characters of this drama are co-depending on one another, internally distorted by the environment they live in, which inevitably is being distorted as well, forcing selves-and-others into exactly this psychosomatic procedure of distortion.

From the very beginning, Gregor Samsa is unable to break free from his prison. He is full of guilt even in the thought of a possible escape, depriving himself of such a probability. He accepts this distorting bondage, as an existential decision to commit into a family-and-social prison, playing the part he is being given, faithfully, until his death. Momentarily, the others find their inward salvation, under the thought: “I am not that filthy creature, he is, the isolated one, the fallen, the different.” They do not manage however to remain in that state, since they are working as the gears of a painful, distorting, monster-bearing machine.

The people in the Metamorphosis act and react as if they were tangled in a thousand threads, into an absurd labyrinth of fragmented reflections, where the excruciatingly established and recurrent social behaviors are forming an irrational machine of various psychosomatic distortions, without the possibility to escape. They are functioning into perpetual repetition, totally unaware of their condition. Their ignorance, regarding the deadlocks they recreate and the perpetual coherence of their actions, eventually transforms them into suffering creatures, imprisoned by their own images for themselves-and-the-world.

And that is exactly what the Metamorphosis is: a never-ending scream against the voluntary existential isolation of modern people. However, people can act in a different way. They always have the choice to break free from their prison, to oppose to their daily images, the choice to end the whatsoever nightmare, and finally, be creative for themselves-and-the-world. But inevitably, the question is set: is it up to each one of us to choose between de-humanization and the challenging of a different way of life, even a different world? Such a decision, however, is definitely beyond the ideological safety of our fragmented world, thus reaching the level of existential choice.

Savvas Stroumpos

(Translation: Thei Sorotou )

EXTRACTS FROM REVIEWS ON METAMORPHOSIS

“…Around this body-mass, Stroumpos forges an expressionistic atmosphere of fragments with various autonomised signs (gesture, speech, movement), each of which constitutes for the viewer a little spectacle within the spectacle. An interesting and effective proposal endowed the performance with an uncanny sense. (…) All four actors, fought with the demons of the psyche of the characters and were able to show them of.”

Savvas Patsalidis, Aggelioforos, 13/1/2013

“…Dominated by a highly robust style of a deductive clownery, with the intense physicality as the first mean of expression, without falling to the obvious parody or the easy way of grotesque. Instead, we watch a wisely structured scherzo on the grotesque condition of our existence. All the performers are transformed into “something” because of the countless – intrafamilial, social, capitalist and so on – superpowers that define our lives.”

Iliana Dimadi, Athinorama, 3/5/2012

“…Playing with the peculiar Kafkaesque irony, this poisonous humor that reaches the limits of a mocking suing, with a subtle, almost imperceptible shift in the tragic absurdity, Stroumpos read the text through an existential perspective. (…)The actors mercilessly work with the body so as to distract the scream of agony and intervention of the existential question concerning human nature. The movement becomes an autonomous materiality and through repetition ensures the frightening descent into the depths of the soul, without interrupting the logical analysis of emotions and situations.”

Maro Triantafyllou, Epohi, 6/5/2012