Reviews today looks at the Dublin Theatre Festival
Metamorphosis
Olympia Theatre
"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into a gigantic insect." Depending on the translation, Franz Kafka's stricken hero can also be a giant dung beetle, a monstrous vermin or, more horrifyingly, Steven Berkoff. Now, in this dextrously physical production from Vesturport Theatre and the Lyric, Hammersmith, Gregor has been transformed into an Icelandic gymnast.
In the impressive form of Gísli Örn Gardarsson, who is also co-adaptor and co-director (with David Farr), we first find Gregor upstairs, lying on his bed. That simple position already requires an acrobatic feat: just as his world has been turned upside down, so Gregor's bedroom has been knocked on its side and Bökur Jónsson's two-tiered, vertiginous set grants us an aerial view of this inexplicable metamorphosis.
In performance, this means that if Gardarsson wishes to stand upright he must first swing himself around his floor lamp, grab hold of the pockmarked grips in the wall and generally employ muscle-groups that most of us will never discover. It's always a captivating spectacle, but an awful lot of attention has been given to the surface depiction of what should be a deeper metaphor. It also looks like fun, which, for a story about illness, alienation, dependency and intolerance, is a problem. The Samsa family can barely bring themselves to look at Gregor, but as he delivers his lines while casually scuttling across the ceiling, it's hard for us to take our eyes off Gardarsson. The performance may defy gravity, but it falls down when trying to attach Kafka's allegory to something meaningful.
The other Samsas - Kelly Hunter's neurotic, wheezing Mother, Ingvar E Sigurdsson's domineering Father and Nína Dögg Filippusdóttir's beautiful, hardening Greta - may not avail of the domestic gymnasium, but their comic inflexibility comes with dance-like precision. When forced to care for their incapacitated breadwinner, their growing heartlessness is quickly dressed up in bespoke ideology. To judge from the costumes, Father finds employment as a gendarme, while Filippusdóttir, in her leather boots and severe grey skirt, seems to have been shopping in the National Socialism Supply Store.
Kafka, a chronically unwell Jewish writer, whose unsettling fables prefigured the darkest persecutions of the 20th century, may lend himself to such leaden dramaturgy, but when Jonathan McGuinness's lodger appears, issuing edicts about work making us free and clearing vermin from society, like some cartoonish proto-Führer, the allusion becomes heavy-handed and facile. The final tableau, swooning with beauty and dripping with sarcasm, certainly skewers the Aryan ideal (and none too soon), but although it is a production of constant movement, it takes the frayed warmth of music, by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and Hartley Kemp's iridescent lighting to make it moving. Otherwise the agility is all in the execution, not the interpretation. Until Oct 4 PETER CRAWLEY
Fight Like Apes
Whelan's, Dublin
A masked mannequin named Frank. Crowd surfing metal trash cans. It could only be Fight Like Apes. As they celebrated the launch of their debut album, Fight Like Apes and The Mystery of the Golden Medallion, it was hard to believe that the Dublin band played their first gig less than two years ago.
Bursting on to a crowded local indie scene fully formed, they've spent the intervening time wisely, releasing a brace of well-received EPs and touring the UK incessantly. All the while, bloggers, radio stations and the music press have been getting more and more excited by what they heard.
Non-stop touring is inevitably going to take its toll. Interrupting an exposure-magnifying support tour with The Ting Tings, the four-piece, and particularly the pint-sized bundle of energy that is keyboardist Pockets, appeared slightly subdued at first. The adrenaline rush they needed came from the crowd, who clapped and climbed, sang and swore for the entire set.
FLA's music - synth-rock by genre, The Killers fronted by The Muppets in sound - would definitely not appeal to your granny. But it's not meant to. These are anthems for late teens and twentysomethings who can laugh knowingly at the 1990s TV references, scream along to the random profanities and get lost in the absurdist imagery.
The quirkier side to the band's personality was in full evidence. The audience was treated to the seven-second Megameaniethree times, a blistering Canhead(sample line: "Goodness me, it's fish and chips, fish and chips, fish and chips"), and a raw cover of McLusky's Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues. Then there are songs that aim for the stars and reach them every time. Jake Summersand Something Globalpack innumerable hooks, and when delivered by a frontwoman of MayKay's talent and confidence, they soar even higher.
In a set lasting an hour there was very little wastage. By the end of the year, Fight Like Apes will be headlining larger venues than this. It's impossible not to feel that the band are on the cusp of something big. Whether that's longevity and greatness or a short-term fad will be a fate entirely of their own making. BRIAN KEANE
