KAFKA’S APE at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

★★★★★

“Kafka’s Ape is a powerful opportunity for a solo performer. Tony Bonani Miyambo takes it, and delivers”

The Noma Yini Company from Johannesburg, under the direction of Phala Ookeditse Phala, brings an extraordinary adaptation of a short story by Kafka to this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, and you have to put it on your “must see” list. Kafka’s Ape is a tour de force performance by actor Tony Bonani Miyambo, and he ended today’s performance in tears. I’m pretty sure we were all crying inside as well.

Kafka’s Ape is adapted from the Czech author’s 1917 short story A Report To An Academy. In it, an ape named Red Peter gives a lecture to an academy about his transformation from an animal to an “evolving man”. He describes how he was shot at, and then captured, by a group of hunters. He is placed in a cage on a ship that takes him far away from his home. Red Peter is in such excruciating discomfort in the cage that, in an effort to distract himself, he begins studying the humans around him. He knows he cannot get free from his cage; instead he looks for a more philosophical “way out” of his predicament. His way out is to imitate human behaviour so successfully that, at the time of giving his lecture, Red Peter can barely remember what it was like to be an ape. He tells us, his audience, of learning to drink alcohol; to smoke, and to wear clothes. Despite the tragedy of his situation, Red Peter is certain that “experience is not what happens to one, but what one does with what happens to one.”

The power of Tony Bonani Miyambo’s performance lies in taking these words, and showing us, in a very physical way, how Red Peter reaches this state of “evolution”. From the moment he enters the performance space in The Demonstration Room (ironically a former lecture theatre of the school of veterinary studies) at Summerhall, Miyambo focuses our attention. As Red Peter, he moves in a curious hybrid way morphing between ape and human as the situation demands. In just one example, Miyambo cleverly uses a lectern on stage to show how challenging it is for an ape with a bullet wound in his hip to pull himself upright to speak. As Red Peter does so, the process in his metamorphosis from ape to “evolving man” could hardly be made more clear. (And one is reminded of another of Kafka’s stories where the process goes the other way, from man to insect.) In Kafka’s Ape, Miyambo involves the audience right from the start. He delivers the lecture directly to us. And not just as an “evolving man.” We are inspected for fleas, as any conscientious ape would do. Are we also an audience of apes, or of “evolving men” ourselves? In true Kafkaesque form, Miyambo allows us to wonder about that, and to feel the ambiguous state that Red Peter himself is in.

Despite Red Peter’s intelligence and courage, Miyambo shows us the great tragedy in Kafka’s Ape. No longer anything quite recognizable, Red Peter is alienated from everything he left behind. He can no longer form relationships with other apes, because he is no longer one of them. He feels both shame and alienation from himself as well as others, despite being an “evolving man”. The adaptation of Kafka’s short story, with its echoes of apartheid, and the slave ships, carries added tragic meaning when performed by a black South African theatre company. This is a very moving production to watch, and to listen to.

Kafka’s Ape is a powerful opportunity for a solo performer. Tony Bonani Miyambo takes it, and delivers. See this show while you can.

KAFKA’S APE at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe – Summerhall – Demonstration Room

Reviewed on 11th August 2024

by Dominica Plummer

Photography by Zivanai Matangi

KAFKA’S APE

KAFKA’S APE

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