Drawing Rooms and iPods in the Theatre

Having just watched Metamorphosis at the Lyric, Hammersmith:

The Lyric is a strange theatre - A Matcham auditorium dating back to the late 19th century, it was earmarked for destruction in a 1960's redevelopment program, then - after the locals took up arms - saved by a developers compromise, as follows: they knocked down the outside of the theatre, but preserved it's innards, and, having built their glass and steel vision, sat the shelled auditorium in the new building, suspended 2 storeys up. Nowadays you ascend into the theatre through white walls and wide steel framed stairs out of an airport terminal, and swing the doors to enter into a perfectly embalmed music hall auditorium, a riot of plush velvet and plaster fantasias.

The perfect theatre for a play, then, in which a man also wakes up to find himself the same on the inside, but with a modern and unfamiliar exterior: Franz Kafka's economic fairytale, The Metamorphosis.

The production was in the vein of the theatre company Frantic Assembly: using techniques which were displayed in that company's dismal play Stockholm, albeit with a better script. For those who don't know, Frantic Assembly do straight theatre interlaced with physical pieces of a dance and/or acrobatic nature, and doctor their sets to acheive special effects.

So that when the woman performs oral sex on the man in Stockholm, stage hands poke flowers through previously unseen gaps in the walls, as the kind of wallpaper equivalent of an orgasm. Likewise, at one point in Metamorphosis, the wall/ceiling of Gregor's room is shifted out by unseen hands, leaving an unexpected display of chrysanthenums in receding perspective. Having a fit of middle class paranoia, the man in Stockholm is shuffled up the wall by a chock hidden in the wall, as if he was levitating. (A mechanical joke borrowed from the Laurel & Hardy films, aiming for a kind of horror effect in this production). One of Gregor's walls changes from a trampoline consistency to being a hard floor from one scene to the next.

In Metamorphosis, the transformation of the beetle is figured by the fact that all of Gregor's room has been shifted through 90 degrees, and whereas we see the ground floor in normal perspective, we look down at his room from above. The actor's resultant insectile clambering and discomfort is a more indirect and clever alternative to a giant beetle suit. The physical theatre element in the Frantic Assembly piece consisted of dance pieces that were slotted into a regular script.

The problems with this type of production are as follows: the dance pieces are not generally as good as something professional. The stage mechanisms are clunky, and achieve effects that a stage magician would dismiss immediately as too amateur. The straight acting, having probably been neglected in preference to the bit where they get to swing round the lampstand, is not as good as it could be. It must be said that Stockholm was infinitely worse in all of these respects than Metamorphosis, but the problems were still there.

My second problem, having seen this play, is: why the return of the drawing room? Did the New Left theatre practitioners of the 60s and 70s, who spent so much effort getting rid of the drawing room, laboured in vain? They're putting on Terence Rattigan in the West End again! Someone help us!

Whether it be something in the zeitgeist, or the water, or both, the drawing room is back with a vengeance. The polished granite kitchen complete with iPod adaptor and fridge with ice maker of the Stockholm set, or the chintzy clutter of the Samsa's home: these are plays with characters that, having aimed at middle class respectability (i.e. furniture, gadgets, trinkets) are ridiculously encumbered and hemmed in by it. The difference is that, whereas the Samsas (not excepting Gregor) are ridiculous and furniture-obsessed by Kafka's design, the nameless and vapid yuppies that Bryony Lavery has spawned are ridiculous and furniture-obsessed without her knowing it. She takes them as avatars of 'modern love' (Alas, the Guardian was convinced as well). The closetedness and narrow mindedness of drawing room drama are alive again in Stockholm, deficiencies papered over with a few bits of machinery business, pumping music and rock and roll dancing with kitchen utensils.

The drawing room, having recolonised 'drama', has even managed to annex new territory in the theatre: Pierre Rigal, the French contortionist and dancer, has the walls of a room close in on him in PRESS, which was seen at The Gate this year. Watch out for your iPod, Pierre.

By way of postscript: Once Gregor had acheived his final immobility, suspended from a red curtain over the kitchen table, and his sister had incongruously flowered in his vacated room, and the lights had gone down, come up for the bows, and come up for us, the audience filed out. A crush developed on the stairs, where people had stopped and were gawking out of the windows to get a no-cost look at the play that was going on simultaneously across the courtyard. In my frustration, I squeezed out, and in doing so, trod on the heel of an old chap who was making his way down the stairs and who, moreover, I had specifically told myself I should not tread on. Sorry to him. But also proof that the pettiness and meanness of Kafka's world (I include myself) goes on after the final curtain.