The Centre for the Less Good Idea is an interdisciplinary incubator space for the arts based in Maboneng, Johannesburg

APRIL 2021 | KAFKA’S APE | A KAFKA MOMENT

Kafka’s Ape is an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s short story A Report to an Academy, directed by Phala Ookeditse Phala and performed by Tony Bonani Miyambo.

Following an invitation of Kafka's Ape by the University of Toronto and the University of Western Cape, the award-winning play was staged and live-streamed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in April 2021 as part of both The Centre’s For Once programme and A Kafka Moment, a mini-season of works based on, or inspired by, the writings of Franz Kafka.

Kafka’s Ape is a play that takes a metaphorical view on South African society through the eyes of an ‘evolving’ primate who is made to present a formal report on his attempts at mimicking human nature. Through this extended metaphor, the play also highlights the complexities of identity in post-apartheid South Africa and among the human race more broadly. Since its inception over a decade ago, Kafka’s Ape has travelled to countries across the globe and has been performed alongside a plethora of critical moments in recent history. The realities of xenophobia, racism, animal cruelty, genocide, and more have all been absorbed and grappled with by the play throughout its years of touring.

While Kafka’s Ape is a rich adaptation of a profound and wide-ranging text, a great deal of the play’s effectiveness lies in its physical performance. A minimalist set and prop list allows Miyambo to utilise the extent of the stage – populated only by a speaker’s podium and a simple steel frame bearing the conference banner – and more convincingly embody the character of the ape known as Red Peter. From the moment that Miyambo enters the stage and addresses the audience, he adopts the low gait, the laboured breath, the erratic mannerisms and particularities, and the existential sufferings of his character. Similarly, simple yet pointed lighting and sound design serve to mark and enhance the play’s lighter or more macabre moments in equal measure.

Brief, playful interludes involving audience interaction serve to give pause to the weighty nature of the ‘report’ being given, while reminding those seated and watching the play that they are witness to, or perhaps even complicit in, the anguish and oppression that Red Peter labours under. The tormented cries of an ape being caged or wounded, or the frightening act of downing a bottle of alcohol in an early attempt at mimicking his capturers punctuate the narrative at key moments throughout the performance, returning always to the key themes in Kafka’s Ape – otherness, inhumanity, alienation, dissociation, and the unbearable reality of not being at home in one’s own body.

While Kafka’s original story tests the notions of identity, assimilation, and survival, Phala and Miyambo’s adaptation and staging of the text ultimately reckons with the unending complexities of identity in the contemporary world. It is a performance that, through the seemingly simple binaries of human and animal, begins to pick apart the complicated relationship between the self and the other, and the self as other. It is when the lines between the two begin to grow unclear, that Kafka’s Ape is brought to life.

– David Mann