UFO Info Week-End

Barely a word is spoken and that is a limitation at points with slightly too

Barely a word is spoken and that is a limitation at points, with slightly too much whimsical kidult clowning. Gregor’s sister swiftly begins to resemble a member of the Jungmadel, if not a brutal contemporary prison guard, while his uniformed father ominously starts shouting that work will set everyone free.In Longwave, directed and co-devised by the sensitive experimentalist Chris Goode, two geeky scientists are holed up in a wooden shed in what might be the Antarctic. By updating the story to the 1930s, Farr also makes Kafka apparently foresee the rise of Germanic Nazism. He scurries across the ceiling (using hidden handles) and dangles over his seething father’s head. When he speaks, we can understand him but his neurotic, spindly mother (Kelly Hunter) clasps her hands over his ears as if he’s making an intolerable din.Gardarsson isn’t an absolutely first-rate actor and he is, now and then, allowed to rely on one expressionistic posture for too long. The gymnastic skills can also be obtrusive (not least trampolining).

But Gardarsson’s performance is surely vying with Antony Sher’s legendary arachnid Richard III, and his Icelandic accent actually helps convey Gregor’s alienation.The allegory, informed by Kafka’s own life, is at once clear and complex, implicitly depicting a stigmatised invalid and cruel carers, but also an artistic type stuck in an oppressive society and going wild – finding some liberation in running mad as well as terminal lonely despair. To the horror of his family, he then comes sliding down the banisters, like a hunched spider interbred with a monkey. Above the Samsas’ dour dining room, their son’s shadowy bedroom has actually flipped 90 degrees, courtesy of Borkur Jonsson’s dizzying set design. Gregor’s standard lamp and potted palm are sprouting out of the wall, and we seem to be gazing down at this poor crazed creature from a high corner as he stares out, bug-eyed, from his vertical bed.

Rigid and hanging out from the mattress (with straps round his wrists), he looks as if his whole being is in the grip of hair-raising terror. Freely co-adapted and directed by Gisli Orn Gardarsson of the Icelandic troupe Vesturport, this is an acrobatic and visually startling reworking of Kafka’s nightmare about the young drudge who wakes one morning to find he has turned into a beetle.There are blessedly no cockroach costumes here. The play’s worries about Max’s sadistic streak and fear of tenderness – which Horst condemns as akin to the Nazis – strikes me as bravely polemical. However, some might critically lament the closing image of him, finally casting aside his cadged yellow star for a frank pink triangle, standing up to be counted only to kill himself.Gregor Samsa is in a prison of his own sort – in a far more surreal but also implicitly fascistic realm – in David Farr’s new staging of Metamorphosis (with lyrically melancholic background music supplied by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis).

Gardarsson plays Gregor in a disheveled grey suit and tie but he is physically, literally going up the wall. Max’s lover, Rudy, sashays around like a camp housewife in pink satin, then a kinky, hunky Aryan pops out of the bedroom, sporting only Stormtrooper boots and parading his wares. Unfortunately, the singsong prattle of Kevin Trainor’s Rudy, with insufficient comic timing, is tiresome. And if he and Cumming are supposed to be self-consciously acting like a cabaret duo, Kramer leaves that half-baked. More problematically, when the persecution gets serious, the leering Gestapo keep looking like crude caricatures.
That said, Cumming becomes increasingly moving and harrowed as the play gets stronger and confronts Max with devastating moral crises – particularly when his terror and survival instincts drive him to violence in obedience of SS orders. There are also moments of fragile but triumphant humanity, when Max and his Dachau friend, Horst (outstanding newcomer Chris New), keep each other alive by just imagining and talking about holding each other. Alan Cumming stars as Max, the goodtime gay in 1930s Berlin who, after the Night of the Long Knives, finds himself being hunted down by homophobic Nazis then imprisoned in a concentration camp alongside Jews and other so-called degenerates.

It must be said, if you wish for truly great writing, this play has not fully stood the test of time. Two winters ago, Daniel Kramer directed an unforgettable Woyzeck at Notting Hill’s tiny Gate Theatre – with thuggish army violence unnervingly danced out like rock ‘n’ roll That production deservedly transfers to New York next month. Kramer’s directing is rough around the edges as well, exposed on a large, scrappy stage. The opening scene with Max tottering around his apartment in a kimono – so hung over he’s forgotten about his boho night-before – is clearly meant to be a little domestic farce, sown with the seeds of trouble. Sometimes it’s rushed, sometimes repetitive, sometimes too calculatedly tear-jerking. In the mean time, Kramer’s new production of Martin Sherman’s famed 1979 tragedy, Bent, has opened in the West End. He and Peter Morgan have their first thought of a picture about Brian Clough – old big head – as a rising manager and loudmouth in his conflict with the grim Don Revie.