2024-01-20 22:58:12
Photos: Marcella_Ruiz_Cruz
VIENNA / Academy Theater of the Burgtheater:
THE TRANSFORMATION according to Franz Kafka
Premiere: January 20, 2024
Illustrating prose has long been commonplace in our theaters. Novels and stories are constantly being dramatized on the stage. The reader who engages with Franz Kafka’s most famous story, “The Metamorphosis”, will decide with himself and the author how he imagines Gregor Samsa, who has become a “monstrous vermin”, and what Kafka wanted to say to him in this cryptic story .
Director Lucia Bihlerwhich is now bringing this work to the Academy Theater stage, has decided, as she said in the APA interview, “not to want to answer the questions that this metaphor raises.”
So what does she do? First, a short background story – the black-clad family members of Gregor Samsa (who are also joined, in a possible dramaturgical leap, by Franz Kafka himself), initially sing the famous first sentence of the story in chorus and in canon. “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”
Some people may not have gotten beyond this first sentence, and their hope of learning something concrete regarding the content of the story will be severely disappointed. (One remembers the classic American joke: “Have you read Anna Karenina?” “No, but I know the movie.”)
Of course, the text is far too long to fully realize, but Kafka delves into Samsa’s inner life often enough – how he reacts when he has to understand his insect existence, how he perceives his family’s behavior, how he, to a certain extent, chose himself dies in order to no longer burden her, that is not verbalized here at all.
There are pictures for that, colorful pictures of Pia Maria Mackert, Gregor’s room in kitsch colors. This room changes in detail from time to time, but always looks as if David Hockney painted it. An artificial world that is difficult to navigate. Inside you will find yourself in a bright orange jacket (costumes: Victoria Behr) Gregor Samsa already as a beetle:
It’s definitely the best idea of the evening to come from the actress/dancer/choreographer Paulina Alps because the inner life of the character is not verbalized according to the director’s concept (except as a final punch line, where Samsa himself speaks the opening sentence once more – although he should actually be dead there), the insect’s body language is the best effect of the evening .
Lucia Bihler has deleted the other characters in the story (the authorized representative, the subtenants, the waitress) and concentrates entirely on the family, and that’s what it’s all regarding – father, mother, sister. As long as Gregor alone fed them all and paid their debts, he was a valued (if exploited) member of the family. When he becomes useless as a beetle/insect/vermin, he just becomes a burden. The “people” of the family are transformed into dolls with cardboard heads and artificial-looking clothes, gradually acting out the exclusion of the unnecessary in a few scenes, which are, however, fairly uniform.
There are effects that work without making any profound sense – suddenly the room is tiny, so Gregor is comparatively huge, then he shrinks into an (artificial) doll that the adults handle. But these are all just images, the cruel psychology behind everything hardly comes through.
Above all, because the evening has a cardinal flaw – it pays far too little attention to Kafka’s text (apart from a few fragments, sometimes played by one actor, sometimes by another). Great literature, melted together into an almost pantomime.
The family itself is of a comfortable middle class, but gradually shows its toughness – Stefanie Dvorak as the daughter, Dorothee Hartinger as the mother, Philipp Hauss from father.
A convincing, slim, dark Kafka-like figure poses Jonas Hackmann on stage, he should just work on the precision of his language.
Anyone who has taken the trouble to read the story once more before attending the performance will honestly have to say that not even a minimal fraction of what Kafka wrote is conveyed here. The poet always gives you goosebumps when you read it. The non-stop, hour-and-a-half “colorful evening” in the Academy Theater, however, produces little more than boredom.
Renate Wagner
1705799103
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