The Stage

Kafka’s Monkey

Published Friday 20 March 2009 at 12:00 by Jason Best

The chameleonic Kathryn Hunter pulls off another theatrical coup with her astonishing solo performance in this adaptation of Franz Kafka’s surreal short story A Report to an Academy. She’s played King Lear and Richard III, and a nine-year-old autistic girl in Spoonface Steinberg - now she goes beyond gender and age transformations to deliver a portrayal of an ape that has become a human being.

Shuffling on stage in natty white tie and oversized tailcoat to deliver a lecture to an undefined audience of experts, Hunter’s Red Peter displays a striking mix of simian and human characteristics. Toes turned inwards, elbows turned out, knees sagging, Red Peter is one moment an ape in evening dress, the next an all-too human dandy. In Hunter’s hands, this is playful and comic, but sadness isn’t far away.

Red Peter’s listeners expect a description of his former life as an ape, but his metamorphosis has permanently sundered him from his animal past. Instead, he offers an account of his transformation. How he became a human by, yes, aping his spitting, smoking, rum-drinking captors. In five years, he reveals, “I reached the cultural level of an average European”.

In Kafka’s darkly sardonic and teasingly enigmatic tale, this evolution isn’t necessarily an ascent. And in showing the cost of Red Peter’s forced assimilation into an alien culture, Hunter’s tragic-comic figure also reveals the pain of human self-estrangement.