Robot show is more than mechanical

Franz Kafka's seminal work The Metamorphosis is famous for its themes of alienation, absurdity and now androids, as a robot takes center stage in a new theatrical adaptation.

Acclaimed Japanese director Oriza Hirata worked with leading roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro to create the star of the show, a tall gangly robot with a metal skeleton and white human-like face and hands.

"Even though people react when they see a robot, you can tell people are not moved by it," Hirata says.

"I wanted to create a situation in which a robot could move an audience."

In Kafka's 1915 novella, traveling salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning inexplicably transformed into a repulsive insect, causing his family to hide him away in shame and disgust.

Hirata's production swaps the big bug for a cold silver frame and an automated voice, testing the dramatic timing of four French actors chosen to play his family.

The company - robot included - worked on the play for a month in the remote town of Kinosaki in western Japan.

The show, titled La Metamorphose version Androide, opened for a short run in Yokohama on Thursday and then will travel to Europe to kick off the Autumn Festival Normandy next month in France.

Award-winning actress Irene Jacob praised the acting skills of her on stage android son.

"It's a bit like a white mask, as we say in French 'masque blanc', in theater," she says.

"It has something quite theatrical all right ... sometimes he can smile a little bit or even laugh."

Some may see the robot as a canny choice to illustrate the book's discussion of isolation in modern capitalist society, which resonates in the technology-obsessed present day, nearly 100 years since the story was published.

Ishiguro, head of a robotics lab at Osaka University, is a well-known figure in Japan who has already staged several plays featuring robots with Hirata.

But this is the first to be performed in a language other than Japanese - the production is in French with Japanese subtitles.

In the past, Ishiguro has created a robot based on himself, an android newscaster and a cheeky talking humanoid robot called Pepper.

Agence France-Presse