Coronavirus has stopped Vanishing Point’s new production of The Metamorphosis in Italy, but the show goes on in Scotland

It took just a few years – after it was formed 20 years ago – for Matthew Lenton’s Vanishing Point to become one of the most internationally acclaimed and connected theatre companies Scotland has ever produced. Since 2003, the company has worked in France, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, Switzerland, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Georgia; and also beyond Europe in China, South Korea, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Sri Lanka. It’s an experience that has brought an astonishing richness to the company’s work, and helped shape its intensely visual and physical style of theatre; so much so that in 2016, Vanishing Point was offered a unique showcase at the Edinburgh International Festival, presenting its recent show The Destroyed Room – a powerful response to the refugee crisis on Europe’s borders – alongside the company’s remarkable 2009 piece Interiors.

Robert Jack, Elicia Daly, Alana May Jackson and Paul Thomas Hickey rehearse Vanishing Point's new production production of The Metamorphosis

If there are huge advantages to this intense web of international connection, though, there are also occasional risks; and so it’s perhaps not surprising that last week, Vanishing Point became the first Scottish theatre company to be forced to make a major schedule change because of the coronavirus crisis. The company’s new show The Metamorphosis, a 21st century version of Franz Kafka’s great 1915 novella, was set to open this weekend as part of the VIE Festival in the city of Cesena in the Emilia Romagna region, a hundred miles south of Venice; but on 22 February the Italian government announced major quarantine restrictions on public gatherings across a large area of northern Italy. The VIE Festival, run by the Emilia Romagna Theatre Foundation, was cancelled; and back in Glasgow, Lenton and his executive producer Severine Wyper began the complex and expensive process of reassembling the production team, half of whom were already in Italy along with the show’s Italian cast member, Nico Guerzoni, and the set for the production.


“We had to get the rest of the cast back from Glasgow airport,” says Lenton, “because they were literally on the point of flying out. But in many ways we’ve been lucky; and the ERT are such good partners that I’m sure we’ll be able to work something out, and get the show back to Italy later in the year, if at all possible.”


For now, though, the company’s focus is on what will now be the show’s world premiere at the Tron Theatre, the third co-producing partner in the Metamorphosis project. Over the last decade, Lenton’s work with Vanishing Point has been much preoccupied with ageing and death, ranging from lyrical and powerful treatments of dementia in shows like Saturday Night, Tomorrow, and The Beautiful Cosmos Of Ivor Cutler, to last year’s Dark Carnival at the Tramway, Traverse and Dundee Rep, set underground in a Glasgow cemetery, where the dead party on, while the living grieve.
In Metamorphosis, though, the focus is not so much on the death of the hero, a humble salesman called Gregor Sansa, as on the gradual loss of hope he experiences after he wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant beetle. “I read Kafka’s Metamorphosis 20 years ago,” says Lenton, “and was actually quite disappointed – ‘He turns into a beetle, and then what?’ was my reaction. When I re-read it two years ago, though, after discussing it with Claudio Longhi of ERT – well, it was as if a whole lifetime of experience on my part had made all the difference. I was so moved by Kafka’s vision of how Gregor becomes ever more marginalised and persecuted, incrementally, after this change comes over him.


“I realised that the metamorphosis that really drives this story is not Gregor’s transformation, which happens right at the beginning, but the societal change that follows in the people around him, once he is seen to be “different.” It’s about how his family, who are loving and concerned at first, eventually become his executioners, and about the self-justifications they use for that shift. And all of that is just so chillingly accurate and far-sighted when you think about the similar processes of “othering” and self-justification we can see right now, both here in Europe, and across the world.”


The full version of The Metamorphosis will feature a cast of seven, including leading Scottish actors Robbie Jack and Paul Thomas Hickey. As with Dark Carnival, though, later in the year the show will reappear in a short “Unplugged” touring version, reshaped for just two actors, and directed by Vanishing Point associate Joanna Bowman.


“I know that if Vanishing Point was based in London,” says Lenton, who came to Scotland 25 years ago and is fiercely attached to his adopted home, “it would receive recognition on a completely different scale. But I’m also quite defiant about the fact that we’re not based there, and that we speak from here. Of course, Brexit will make the logistics of our work more difficult; it’s heartbreaking, in many ways. But we have so many exciting projects we want to pursue – one in Argentina, for example – that we have no choice but to keep on making it work, in every way we can.


“And meanwhile, I love the feeling of taking these Unplugged shows to community venues all over Scotland, and honouring that touring tradition that goes back to 7:84, nearly 50 years ago. Will Joanna and the team be able to make a John McGrath-style “good night out” of The Metamorphosis? I don’t know; even Kafka described the story as ‘exceptionally nasty.’ But we’re going to give it a go, with a female perspective based on the story of Gregor’s sister; and after that – well, then we might be able to take the full version back to Italy, at last.” 



The Metamorphosis is at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, from 10-21 March, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 1-4 April, Dundee Rep 9-11 April, and Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, 15-17 April. The Metamorphosis Unplugged is on tour across Scotland from 11 May until 6 June, www.vanishing-point.org