Stage Play of Kafkas The Metamorphosis

I found a website that had reviews on a London stage play of The Metamorphosism. They explain how the stage is set out to creat a very eerie, juxtaposed position of gregors room, with his room upstairs and the living room on the lower level being able to look up at Gregors room. i think this is a fascinating idea and could be something to consider for our own set design.

"How do you stage Kafka’s Metamorphosis? Extremely athletically in the case of this co-production between the Lyric and the Icelandic company, Vesturport, who have already astonished us with their Romeo and Juliet and Woyzeck. But the triumph of the production is that it uses physical ingenuity to get to the tragic heart of Kafka’s fable.

The premise is familiar: Gregor Samsa, a Czech commercial traveller, awakes one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect. But Kafka’s mix of realism and fantasy is instantly caught in Born Jonsson’s split-level set. The lower level is a drably furnished Prague sitting-room. On the upper storey, we get a ceiling-eye view of Gregor’s room, reminiscent of a weirdly-angled Anthony Green Royal Academy painting. The contrasting viewpoints immediately usher us into Kafka’s world of strange juxtapositions.
You can, of course, interpret the story in many ways: autobiographically, Freudianly, symbolically. But David Farr and Gisli Orn Gardarsson, as joint adaptor-directors, see it as domestic tragedy and political metaphor. Gregor becomes an image of marginalised people everywhere. His father, here christened Hermann after Kafka’s dad, is inseparable from his quasi-military, bank-messenger’s uniform. And the family’s lodger turns on Gregor vehemently to proclaim “the time will come when we will clear the vermin from our society”.
Kafka wrote his story in 1912; but in this version it becomes a prophetic vision of the European nightmares to come.
The one thing it is not is a simple story of an insect. Gardarsson, who plays Gregor in a business suit, brilliantly expresses his physical transformation by hanging from the ceiling and leaping from one precarious toehold to another. But, under the acrobatic daring, he constantly reminds us of Gregor’s residual humanity. He creeps up on the family to eavesdrop on a discussion of their financial future and, with unbearable poignancy, is destroyed by his urge to listen to his sister’s violin-playing.
Quite rightly, it is the family who are the real grotesques. Ingvar E Sigurdsson’s father is a domestic bully who hurls a chair, on which Gregor has sat, out of the window. Nina Dogg Filippusdottir also captures immaculately the sister’s terrifying translation from Gregor’s helpmate into his tormentor.
But the final moment when the family go for a spring walk to an exultant tune from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, captures perfectly what Nabokov once called the “ironic simplicity” of Kafka’s climax."

wordpress.com, http://gerryco23.wordpress.com/2008/02/08/metamorphosis/, date accesssed 16/03/2011