Gregor Samsa wakes and finds that his life has changed – and not for the better…

Alan Harris’ opener for this new short season of Dangerous Visions plays takes the core elements of Franz Kafka’s novella and updates them cleverly for the 21st century. In places he subverts expectations – in fact, right from the get-go, anyone who knows the original is slightly wrong-footed – but there’s no part of it that feels as if it’s going against the intentions of the original author. There are situations that aren’t in the original, but they feel like scenes we’d have seen had Kafka not focused so closely on Gregor.

Harris adds a couple of blackly comic characters – a pest controller who definitely feels as if he’s auditioning for The League of Gentlemen, and Juri, who has a rather darker agenda as lodger than those who appear in the original – but they help demonstrate just how ordinary a background Gregor himself comes from.

There are a number of auditory tricks used to convey the alienation that Gregor feels – the way in which he hears speech, and the way he is heard by others work particularly well – and the sound design and direction by James Robinson emphasise just how much his world is altered. There’s heavy use of narration by Peter Marinker with Tom Basden’s Gregor and Emma Sidi’s Grete particularly credible as the siblings thrown into the most bizarre of circumstances.

Verdict: An excellent start to the new season. 9/10

Paul Simpson