Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Kafka’s Ape
Noma Yini
Genre: Drama, Solo Performance, Solo Play
Venue: Summerhall
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Based on Kafka’s short story (A Report to an Academy) about an ape who learns human behaviour Phala’s play, Kafka’s Ape, examines how we view and construct the other. As the ape, Red Peter, gives a lecture to a scientific conference, we see his struggle between being true to his intrinsic nature and assimilating into the dominant culture to be accepted. Tony Bonani Miyambo’s performance is absolutely outstanding: deeply physical and emotional, it is, at times, an uncomfortable watch for good reason.
Review
Kafka’s Ape is based on a short story, A Report to an Academy, by Kafka. In the story and in this play adaptation, Red Peter is an ape who has taught himself to behave like a man but is never able to escape his intrinsic nature and being viewed as a curiosity. Kafka’s original short story was believed to be about Jewish assimilation in the Austro-Hungarian empire. Here, Phala Ookedtse Phala’s play uses the short story as a starting point to look at analogous contemporary concerns about how we view the other and about what is civilised and acceptable.
In this production, a black man playing the ape gives the ape-man transformation an uncomfortable resonance, bringing to mind only too recent racist tropes of comparisons of black people to apes and bananas being thrown onto football pitches.
Red Peter tells us of how he was shot and captured in Tanzania and was then imprisoned and transported to the Eastern Cape in South Africa on a ship, on which he tells us he might have drowned.
“And then I would have drowned
There are more still drowning
I do not understand why there are more still drowning today”
Lines which speak to us particularly powerfully at a time where people continue to attempt to cross the Mediterranean in search of sanctuary and drown nameless in their thousands.
On board, he learns and mimics the activities of men to escape his captivity. Human habits are shown up in a ridiculous light as he teaches himself by imitation to smoke, spit and to drink alcohol. When Red Peter reaches his destination his options are limited to the Music Hall or the Zoo, and while he chooses the Music Hall, it is a choice, nonetheless, where his external reality remains determined by the gaze of others.
Here, the audience looks down onto a stage set up for a scientific conference with a banner proclaiming World Species Conference. Red Peter (Tony Bonani Miyambo) enters the room to address the academy, besuited but bare footed. As he starts to give his lecture on how he transformed himself, he negotiates the space between man and ape uneasily.
Initially Red Peter’s accommodation to human behaviour is accomplished but performative. But as the performance goes on the effort to sustain his assimilation becomes more and more frustrating, and the repression of who he truly is, more harmful, and he begins to unravel. Miyambo conveys this shift powerfully with both movement and voice, moving through an more forced bipedalism to a more natural quadrupedalism, and from speech interspersed with grunts to grunts interspersed with speech. Wonderful simian loping swirls from Miyambo luminate isolated moments where Red Peter forgets his learned human persona to be more freely himself.
Breaking the fourth wall to engage with the audience, Miyambo lopes over to shake hands and pick fleas from their hair, raising the question of how we as the audience engage with the play, with a black man playing an ape, with being complicit in observing someone outside of society and othered by it.
Miyambo’s performance is absolutely outstanding: deeply physical and emotional, watching him move from man to ape and back is deeply unsettling. He inhabits the part of Red Peter utterly and completely with insight and immense power. The closing scene is devastating.
The Demonstration Room at Summerhall provides the perfect viewing space for Kafka’s Ape. Here, where countless veterinary students have looked down on specimens, we similarly look down on a ‘specimen’ set out before us giving a lecture. Even the notoriously uncomfortable seats in the Demonstration Room add to the experience as we shift uneasily in our seats questioning our engagement with the spectacle.
Phala Ookeditse Phala initially wrote the play as part of the completion of his MSc thesis. Since then it has been developed with the help of Miyambo and others. The play retains Kafka’s simple story and in telling the story of the ape’s transformation to a human being defies straightforward analysis, instead challenging the audience to come up with its own meaning. Doubtless, productions in different locations will bring differing understandings dependent on context. But wherever this is played, alienation and othering will be central to its truth, and it will challenge us think about those who are marginalised or different in some way.
This is an outstanding production – the combination of Phala Ookeditse Phala’s insightful script (and direction) together with Tony Bonani Miyembo’s astounding performance makes for a powerful theatrical experience.
Don’t take my word for it – go and see it. It genuinely is one of the most powerful performances you’ll see all festival.
