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

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★★★

“The play is an interesting experiment, but as a dramatic piece, full of plot holes”

Nathan Ellis’ experimental drama is a tantalizing piece. The situation is this: every day a different actor is invited to the space where Instructions will take place. The actor knows nothing about the play they are about to perform, there has not been any rehearsal. They have been told that nothing bad will happen by the director, whom they meet fifteen minutes before they are due to go on stage. An irresistible set up, for the actor and the audience, right?

Entering the Old Lab space at Summerhall, all one sees on stage is a screen at the back of the performance space, a camera, a monitor, and a rotation disk. So far, so good. Then Josie, the actor tapped for today’s performance, enters. Words appear on the screen behind them, introducing them. They speak, reading the words from the monitor, and perform the instructions it gives. A story is introduced about an actor who has been invited to audition for a film called Love In Paris. We watch Josie audition. They get the part! We watch them perform the emotions of realizing that this is a turning point in their acting career.

I won’t give away anything else about the plot, although admittedly, it is a sketched in plot at best. Moment to moment, it gives our actor an opportunity to show their acting chops. The camera does most of the work, giving us close ups of Josie’s expressions, and later, moments of connection directly with the audience. Josie’s charm, and willingness to immerse completely in the experience that playwright Ellis and Subject Object have given them, is what keeps Instructions afloat. The play is an interesting experiment, but as a dramatic piece, full of plot holes. It drops references to things like artificial intelligence, for example, that don’t really go anywhere. There is no real conclusion to Instructions, other than the assurance that the play will be performed again, the following day, with a new performer named Nikhil in Josie’s place. The audience is left having to do much of the work of making sense of this piece.

As a piece of hyper-realism—namely sharing in the experience of the actor from moment to moment as they construct a character from the instructions given on a monitor—this piece has some interest. But it’s only a starting point for an exploration of themes fleetingly suggested in the actor’s story. I’d like to see Instructions 2.0, but I strongly suspect that would be a film about the making of the film Love in Paris, using A.I. I’d definitely be up for that.

Tag Archives: Summerhall

KAFKA’S APE

★★★★★

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

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”