Beating classic opening lines such as “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …” and “It is a truth universally acknowledged …” is, at least in my household, “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” (I was a strange child.)

But that delightful image from Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis — cunningly adapted by Futures author Anatoly Belilovsky in his story Gifts of the Magi — has just had a rewrite. And the change is recasting the story — quite literally.

At a point where science fiction transforms into science fact, playwright and director Oriza Hirata has reworked Metamorphosis for the stage and cast a robot as the central character. This is not the first time I’ve heard of a robot taking up acting: Kamelion (voiced by Gerald Flood) was notorious for its role in two Doctor Who stories during Peter Davison’s era, although it was probably more notorious for, um, not working very well. But things have moved on somewhat since the early 1980s, and although we are still some way from an android King Lear, the video footage of Repliee S1 suggests that Hirata has gone some way to achieving his goal of creating “a situation in which a robot could move an audience”.

Hirata has actually been working with robotic actors (no jokes about soap operas, please) for the past five years in the guise of the Robot Theater Project at Osaka University. Collaborating with roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro, who is also behind Repliee S1, Hirata has staged several short plays in Japanese. This latest production goes one step further, pitching the robot as the lead and the performance in French with Japanese subtitles.

Acting alongside Repliee S1 in La Métamorphose Version Androïde is award-winning actress Irène Jacob. The play opens in Japan before transferring to Hungary and then heads for the Autumn Festival in Normandy on 12 November.

This android vision of the future hints finally at robots edging their way into the creative arts — an idea captured neatly by Greg Bear in his Futures story RAM shift phase 2. Whether it will mean that we can look forward to a reworking of Hamlet for daleks (“Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius?” “He has been exterminated”) or La Traviata performed by a slew of R2D2 clones (“Bleeping marvellous” — The RoboTimes) remains to be seen. Mind you, I’m not sure I’d want to audition a room full of robots for Waiting For Godot. But one thing we can be certain of, Repliee S1 is unlikely to forget its lines, miss its cues or corpse. For all you thespians out there, the future may very well be digital, in more ways than one …