Die Verwandlung und andere erzählungen

by Franz Kafka

dramaturgy Federico Bellini, Sybille Meier

with Simon Eckert, Torsten Peter Schnick, Renato Schuch, Rosario Tedesco, Michael Weber

scenery and costumes Annelisa Zaccheria
music Franco Visioli
lighting Giorgio Cervesi Ripa
photo Anna Bertozzi
directed by Antonio Latella

produced by Schauspiel Koln

When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” This is how one of the most curious narrations of the 20th century begins. Locked up in his room Gregor now crawls over the floor, over the ceilings, and his little sister Grete is the only one who supplies him garbage.
Until then Gregor worked as a commercial traveller and was accountable for the maintenance of his family. But now the family starts to change: The father gets a job in a bank, the mother sews at home, Grete works as a salesperson and the family hires a new nurse. Gregor, judged to follow mute, watches from a dark corner of his room the family life like a staging. “We have to try to get rid of it”, rules the sister. The attendance of the beetle has become life threatening. Finally the servant sweeps Gregor’s cadaver into the corner.
Franz Kafka called the narration – which was written in 1912 – an “exquisitely disgusting narration”, not knowing that Gregor Samsa would become the most famous insect of world literature. “After our conversation about ‘the excluded’, I had to think of Franz Kafka with his self-destruction, his phantasies, his words that are like screams. In his work I detect the disease of life, of the misunderstood, the excluded. ‘The Metamorphosis’ can be the starting point of a work about the ignorant and the inability to know oneself. The metamorphosis that interests me is in the move. Being an insect is the reason for the metamorphosis that happens in front of the viewers. The metamorphosis also happens to those who surround him, who change because of the illness, by descending into the monstrous depths of the human being. Father, mother and sister become real executioners. Gregor, who understands everyone and everything, and his family, that loses the touch to Gregor’s words and ideas. Here we find the discharged or the excluded.
Antonio Latella