Samsa-Masjien
DIRECTOR: Jaco Bouwer
CAST: Antoinette Kellermann, Gerben Kamper, Ilana Cilliers, Ludwig Binge
VENUE: The Flipside, Baxter Theatre
UNTIL: January 31
RATING: ****
DIRECTOR Jaco Bouwer’s latest drama is an intense and scary look at how one family struggles to communicate with the very people they should be able to communicate with best.
Written by Willem Anker, the play takes its cue from Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) in which a character is transformed and his family struggle to adjust.
In this case the transformation is that of an elderly parent sinking into dementia and a second, brutal childhood. Here the daughter character is the cold one who regards the changing Gregor character with fear and revulsion and her husband displays an, if not understanding, more accommodating attitude.
Gregor’s wife is the mother character who makes the conscious decision to enter his world and Gregor is still Gregor, the one who changes so drastically, to his own dismay when he stumbles into rare moments of self-aware lucidity.
Themes of alienation, psychological brutality, parent-child conflict, transformation and an elaborately dense language structure all cleverly link back to Kafka’s work. Insects are alluded to in sound, behaviour and dialogue references, but never explicitly shown, again linking to Kafka’s original story.
But, you don’t have to be at all familiar with The Metamorphoses to understand what is happening right in front of your eyes.
Bouwer sets the action in a familiar milieu, a sterile home, and gives us the visual cues of a family that has not been a tight-knit unit for a long time, if they ever were. Physical intimacy is relegated to perfunctory mechanics and while characters talk about the difficulty in dealing with a person who is deteriorating mentally, there is little to no sympathy for the emotional impact.
Parents Gregor (Kamper) and Josephine (Kellermann) move in with daughter Greta (Cilliers) and her husband Tjaart (Binge) when the older couple are no longer able to cope with Dad’s increasingly irrational behaviour.
In talking about how she feels about her father, Greta concentrates more on specific irritating behavioural traits, rather than how she feels about losing this person who has been a bedrock of her life for so long, or what his dementia says about her own probable, physical future. Like any child, Greta doesn’t believe growing old is going to happen to her, treating the idea, and therefore the person, with casual disdain, even revulsion.
The whole family have trouble communicating their emotions and with each other, but the further Gregor goes down the rabbit hole, the more it frees him up to simply be rather than having to conform to society’s norms.
The Afrikaans used throughout is dense, layered with symbolism and repetitive patterns. Allusions to a son named Gregor killed while in the army and Greta’s reminiscence of how her mother coped all reference stoic Afrikaner culture and its disdain for analysing and embracing the emotional.
Samsa-masjien is a technically exacting piece with an intricate soundscape which enhances how it must feel for Gregor to become increasingly alienated from the human experience when even a simple thing like the sound of a cup clanging onto a table doesn’t make sense any more.
The set is built on two levels – it is a house with a basement – and the story builds to a climax of a younger couple trying to live how they assume society wants them to, while the older couple descend to the basement and their baser instincts.
Kellermann bravely puts herself in a very vulnerable position, physically, though it is Kamper who is challenged to a greater degree on the mental side. He wholeheartedly embraces the physicality of the increasingly unstable old man, who finds freedom in letting go, but only when he isn’t aware of what he is doing and losing.
There is no room for improvisation, every action is calculated for maximum effect, every word is carefully chosen and exactly timed and the actors all display a keen sense of timing and spatial orientation.
An assault on the senses, Samsa-masjien is never gentle in its depiction of the mechanics of growing old. It is harsh and brutal, condensing and distilling the human condition to a series of changing attitudes towards physicality, rather than the physical changes themselves.