I went to see Metamorphosis at the Lyric Theatre last night. A surreal, dark and at sometimes very comic play, it is based on the short story by Franz Kafka about an ordinary family whose lives get turned upside down when their son Gregor wakes up one morning having inexplicably been turned into a giant, monstrous insect.
The set design by Börkur Jónsson, an Icelandic stage designer, is both fantastic and appropriately fantastical. The upper half of the split-level design is Gregor’s bedroom is viewed from a bird’s eye perspective, literally turning our perspective upside down. The clever placement of props and fixtures allows Gregor to climb all over his room in an incredible display of bug-like acrobatics.
Metamorphosis was first published in Germany in 1915, considered one of the seminal works of fiction in the twentieth century, it has been translated into many languages and been reprinted many times. As it is always interesting to see different design approaches to a similar theme, I thought I would collect together a few of the numerous jacket designs I found…
I particularly love Christos Kourtoglou‘s illustration (top, second from left). An illustrator based in Athens Greece, he used scraps of paper to create this cover to beautiful effect.
I also like Ben Rothery‘s illustration (bottom, second from right) for Penguin, seen below in full
Kafka wrote Metamorphosis in the height of the German Expressionist movement, which spanned the 1920s and 30s, and this cover is very evocative of the woodcuts by artists such as Ernst Barlach, Otto Dix, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Beckmann. The German Expressionist movement is one of my favourites and definitely deserves a blog post all of its own …
bizy li press 