Review: Kafka’s Metamorphosis: The Musical with Puppets, EdFringe

Pleasance Dome – Ace

The term ‘Kafkaesque’ has become synonymous with the absurd, where bleak realities are juxtaposed with the grotesque and nonsensical. There’s a sense of individual powerlessness in there somewhere, which questions if we’re all just subservient to a bigger, overbearing system. These ideas of absurdity and manipulation go some of the way to explaining why Matt Chiorini and Travis Newton‘s musical about the great author from Prague and his weird work The Metamorphosis (where Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find he’s transformed into a giant insect) is played out as a chirpy musical with puppets.

The show blends Kafka’s biography – especially his relationship with his family – with his works, drawing links between them. In particular it connects The Metamorphosis and a published letter to his father. The facts are interesting and the comparisons clear, if not particularly revelatory.

The talented cast of four (Blake Du Bois, Morgan Smith, Kaia Fitzgerald and Luis Rivera) belt out a variety of numbers with gusto and tight harmonies, accompanied by a terrific soundtrack that brings Central European tones to the tunes and hints at the Czechian context. However, the songs don’t really take advantage of the Bohemian setting to suggest Kafka’s unconventionality, instead just offering standard, familiar American styling. Nor do they do a great deal to enhance or to clarify the story by being highly memorable. Besides the music there is comedy built in, with some interaction using absurd stand up jokes to give the audience a chance to break the fourth wall – whilst perhaps not really smashing the show.

As for the puppets, Franz himself is beautifully designed, with delightful self-animating hair and a single digit pointing forward, interrogating the world. He acts as a bridge between Franz the man and his father, in a space that suggests manipulation and powerplay in action. This puppet is accompanied by several others that include the creature itself, cut from a flat sheet of board at times and at others a painted sheet, along with a potential lodger made from a plunger. Largely though, the puppets are generally there for comedic value. It would have been nice to see them transforming more artistically and imaginatively to interrogate ideas of dehumanisation, although there’s some nice physical work from Du Bois that merges the man and the mutant, blending binary understandings of him.

If you want to learn a bit about Kafka’s biography and enjoy a conventional musical format this is certainly a good show, with a solid standard of performance. Just don’t expect anything particularly transformational from the puppets though.

Directed by: Alan Muraoka
Book and Lyrics by: Matt Chiorini
Music by: Matt Chiorini and Travis Newton
Musical Direction by: Andrew David Sotomayor
Puppet design by: Spencer Lott

Kafka’s Metamorphosis: the Musical with Puppets runs at the Pleasance Dome, Ace Dome until 26 August. Details and booking information can be found here.