The ailing body of man- Kafka’s Metamorphosis
The central theme of Kafka’s writing and the “cross” of his torment is the elusive and inconceivable present, in the context of our modern civilization, idea of the universal Law, which ought to run the world without trial – divides, like the divisive Law established by the Romans. Kafka, himself a lawyer, had been struggling throughout his life to break the shell of this Law which fell into a tool of oppressing the weak from the strong. This is something his abstract, sterile social and political interpretations deliberately hide.
How contemporary Kafka is and how prophetic, and how slightly metaphysical, we find in each text. In “Colony of the punished” e.g. it describes the torture of a convict without trial. In this short story the “judge”, torturer and executioner at the same time, willingly substitutes the victim and takes his place at the end of the day, with the necessary condition that the execution meets the requirements of a public matter to the pity of the unbelievers. The desire of the father’s murder, we could say here, at a first Freudian reading, repels as a feeling of guilt in the theater of the unconscious, and seeks punishment. Or at a second reading we could invoke Nietzsche’s famous position on Judaism.
According to this, the mono and wealthy people of the Bible chose for survival purposes in the hostile world the privileged role of the chosen victim of a terrible living legislator – father – God, who tests his faith and saves him at the last moment. The most famous example is the sacrifice of Abraham, with a happy ending, and less known the sacrifice of his daughter Jephthah with a not happy ending. (It was a girl, see!)
Kafka, a Diaspora Jew divided between two languages, two cultures and two religions, with the syndrome of exclusion by both. We know this today, from the book published only in 1968 by his young friend and “student”, then seventeen-year-old Janusz Gustav, “Chatting with Kafka.” Where he faithfully records all their conversations and transfers us from “first hand” his ideas and thoughts.
Kafka’s cracked humanism is not like the slow Western pharisaic, which spreads his own blood and always spills the blood of others. It’s got a root that’s constantly bleeding. The nucleus of Kafka’s scriptures is the ailing body of the crucified man.
In “Metamorphosis”, an employee, after ten years of continuous repetition of the same constant daily schedule, suddenly one morning fails to get out of bed. He has been transformed into a huge disgusting beetle, yet he is conscious of his condition, a “monster” for others, which causes terror and disgust even in his own family.
The performance of “Metamorphosis”, by the “Institute of Experimental Arts” in “Ex-Machina Theater” in Athens, directed by Tasos Sagris, sees behind the Kafkian parable the truth and removes the allegorical cococoon of the hero’s transformation into an insect, to realistically highlight the constantly tortured, and crucified by the powers and the Law in the service of the powerful, suffering naked body of man, regardless of nation, race, color or gender. Yet, and in his utter humiliation, he still remains human. A directorial choice I applaud.
Sissy Doutsiou, in the leading role, gives a real recital of total physical approach to the suffering and crucified man, reaching the limits of hypocritical self-sacrifice, not hesitating even to “crumple” herself. A dance of family and other “monsters”, with the following, is perfectly moved around her: Stevi Fortoma, Mano Chizek, Loukia Anagnou, Thomas Chavianidis.
The sets and costumes are appropriate, the music itself (Whodoes) and the evocative lighting (George Papandrikopoulos).
