A free, ‘poetic’ adaptation of Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’ will be staged on July 20 at Tehran City Theater’s Sayeh Hall.
‘Little Joys in Becoming a Beetle’ is the new play directed by Azadeh Ansari, a theater director known for her puppet plays, including ‘Makando’, a successful performance based on three short stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Due to her long-time fascination with ‘The Metamorphosis’, Ansari thought of adapting the novella as a play.
“I find it an absorbing experience to fish out my own story from such novels. Kafka’s is one such work. We were able to change its course and make it apt for the stage,” Ansari told Honaronline.
Thus ‘The Metamorphosis’ was morphed into poetic fantasy by playwrights Nader Borhani Marand and Farhad Amini, who are also theater director and dramaturge respectively. In their writing, “they considered my suggestions and took into account the capacities of a puppet performance, while remaining loyal to the ‘Kafkaic’ sentiments of the work,” Ansari said.
“Like in my previous works, I use first-person narrative, just as Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of the story as he tells us his account. But we removed Gregor from his predicament by adopting a puppet approach.” His human side and beetle side become distinct from each other, giving rise to a series of newly-introduced events, she added.
“The play title provides hints on the story: we skimmed the bitterness off Kafka’s work and depicted it in a brighter context.”
Like many modern people, “our version of Gregor lives a routine, repetitive life; however, in spite of the grotesque situation around, he feels happy, getting attracted by everything,” Ansari said.
Unlike her previous plays, the characters are not personified by puppets this time. Instead, she uses masks that symbolize a sort of transformation. “We tried to keep it simple; lofty words are more challenging when spoken in simple manner.”
The play will run through August 20. The cast includes Farzin Mohaddes, Farzaneh Aqeli, Ali Barouti, Bahram Behbahani, Mojtaba Pirzadeh, Mona Abbasi and Minouvash Rahimian.
German-language writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924) first published ‘The Metamorphosis’ in 1915.
