On the 19th October 2023 I attended the Liverpool Playhouse Theatre, which is a venue which I have not been in since perhaps my childhood years. Sister venue to Hope Street’s Everyman Theatre, which has recently had a refit throughout, the Playhouse.. has.. not. Before the performance we went down to the basement were we find.. a bar and fair sized seating area, which seemed to get busy very quickly. The decor is.. outdated and in (places), in dire need of refurbishment and / or a coat of paint. There is a slight musty smell in the air and the bar feels.. outdated and in need of an update too. But the staff are friendly and the drinks are relatively well priced (for a theatre). We left it quite late to take our seats in the house back upstairs, but we made it to our seats which were right on the end of the row, towards the right of the house, 3rd row back. We could see almost everything.. well, there was a rather large head in my direct frontal view, but with there being lots of legroom, it was fairly easy to look around the side of it.
I have wanted to, and waited to see a Frantic Assembly production for what seems like years at this point, so I am so glad that I’ve got to see them perform and I can tell you right here and now, this won’t be the last time I go to see a Frantic Assembly production. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is not.. what you might call an easy going text to get through regardless, but what watching the Frantic Assembly adaptation has made me want to go and find the original text and give it a read, so if that isn’t a good indication for you I don’t know what is…!
The stage at The Playhouse is possibly the most modern and up to date part of the theatre, but the design for this performance was quite simple. A scene depicting a singular room, a bedroom belonging to that of Gregor Samsa, the lead. The room is rundown and in need of decoration. But perfectly fits with the tone of the play. The adaptation written by Lemn Sissay OBE and directed by Scott Graham keeps the majority of the main story beats while modernising where appropriate. The play starts with the same scene repeating over and over, getting quicker and quicker, which is Gregor Samsa waking up from sleep in his bed, getting dressed and saying the line ‘My name is Gregor Samsa and I love Fabric’. As this gets faster and faster you can gain an incite into what is happening here, that Gregor is the family bread-winner and his dedication to his job is what gives him success and in turn his success is very important to the family unit as a whole. Until there is a break. Something breaks. Something has to give.
What the set doesn’t show on first look is how interactive it is. The door opens and closes obviously and every item on the stage is interacted with in one way or another. The bed features heavily as you might expect it would in Metamorphosis and the portrait is equally as important if not more to the main arc of the storyline throughout the play. The whole stage however also partially rotates, I thought to indicate the passage of time perhaps or the ‘metamorphosis’ into different states throughout. It doesn’t rotate in the same way that yesterday’s stage rotated in ‘Peter Pan Goes Wrong’, its movements here are subtle, but yet seem completely fits in with the moments it moves. The ceiling of the room seems low to begin with but this is interactable too. There are moments that Gregor when he has morphed into his creature form, he is hanging from the ceiling. The physical strength it must take to do such and to continue to read lines and perform… Even the lighting fixture sees a fair bit of action in the second half of the performance.
At the end of the play the cast and crew returned to the stage for a standing ovation for a fantastic performance and a few minutes later returned again to host a question & answer session chaired by the Director. – I love these sessions. It is not done often enough. I think some seem to think it is either beneath them to speak with the audience or make themselves available to them after the performance. Perhaps it’s an actor thing.. Perhaps it’s trying to keep the magic of the theatre intact, but personally I think that these are good sessions to have, brilliant ways to find out some of the thinking behind how the performers play these roles. – Frantic Assembly are also really outwardly friendly towards education and after the q & a session I saw cast members taking time to take more questions and take photographs with some of the remaining, younger audience members and school goers. This is a company I will be paying attention to in the future.
A fantastic play and adaptation of Kafka’s work.. If you get the opportunity to see Frantic Assembly, don’t hesitate, book tickets and go see it. Another 10 out of 10 from me.
