David Farr and Gisli Orn Gardarsson’s take on Metamorphosis is a dizzying spectacle and altogether moving piece of theatre. While it contains a profound performance at its core, the production’s power lies in the delight with which it adapts Kafka’s classic. Rather than a stagnant rehashing of the tale, this production revels in the text, makes what it will of its malleable symbolism, and in the process shines new light on Kafka’s genius.

Sixty pages of the starkest, yet most emphatic prose of the last century, Metamorphosis truly is different for every reader. First time around, Gregor Samsa’s casually unexplained transformation into a creepy-crawly seemed to epitomise the alienation of adolescence (what with all that awkward, dysfunctional body stuff) and by proxy the partially self-inflicted isolation of all outsiders - like Camus’ scuttling crab.

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For Farr and Gardarsson the most interesting transformation is not Gregor’s grotesque mutation, but his sister Greta’s very human and disturbingly understandable transition from patience and sensitivity to negligence and then into cruelty. Doing away with the original stream of consciousness narration, the audience is further distanced from Gregor by intelligent set design. Downstairs is all drab normality in the family room, but upstairs in his bedroom the perspective is skewed so that we look in bird’s-eye-view style. Not only is this disorientating, adding to the queasy, unsettling nature of what we see and giving it an air of imprisonment, but it also adds an element of voyeurism. We are perving on his pain, unable to empathise and unwittingly complicit.