Written and Directed by Rae Webb
Review by Jack Cuinn
Summerhall - Demonstration Room: Tickets
Reporting to the academy of audience members gathered in Summerhall's Demonstration Room, Tony Bonani Miyambo is heard before he is seen. Supported by a walking stick, he grunts and shuffles his way into this historic lecture theatre, transformed for this production into the host of 'The Species of the World Conference', to deliver his stellar performance as Kafka's Ape.
Adapted from Franz Kafka's short story, 'A Report to an Academy', Kafka's Ape is an absorbing and compelling performance of what it means to be human. Miyamoto, who plays Ek, later named Red Peter due to a scar he suffers from an arrow, intimately involves the audience in his mutual discovery and explanation of his lecture-style monologue, which addresses the question 'What is the identity of an evolving man?'.
This show is a masterclass in physical characterisation and movement with gestures which resonate with today's post-Apartheid world in which the questions of what defines us as human beings as separate from apes are interrogated to question the divides between us as human beings and how the intergenerational wounds of the apartheid manifest themselves.
Review by Jack Cuinn (contact@corrblimey.uk)
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