Going ape for Kafka on stage

In a one-man show that has been touring the world for years, a larger-than-life actor offers theatre at its pure, raw, fearless best

- Keith Bain

Actor Tony Miyambo didn't so much arrive on stage as land with all the potency and force of a tightly wound coil.

Once there, he delivered not merely a monologue but a manifesto of the heart, an emotionally raw and powerful outpouring that seemed to emanate from the very depths of his soul. It was, for the full 50 minutes of his performance in Kafka's Ape, impossible to escape the pull of Miyambo's unwavering focus and compelling energy.

What he brought to the stage was his everything: intellect and heart, mind and body. And perhaps most of all his incredible humanity.

A lively, fierce and frequently funny stage adaptation of Franz Kafka's 1917 story Report to an Academy, this is one of those emotionally roller-coasterish plays that, done right, causes the molecules in the room to vibrate differently. There's a kind of transmutation that occurs, changing the shared space of the auditorium into something sacred.

With just a few props: a carry-all, a walking stick, a lectern and, later, a frame to climb on, Miyambo becomes Red Peter, an ape who has become humanised, been "civilised" in order to escape the brutality of his human captors and avoid a lifetime of imprisonment.

It is also a metaphor, a way of excavating beneath the layers of human flesh that we all possess to figure out what it is to be truly human.

Sure, Red Peter is an ape, shot and captured somewhere in Africa and transported via a cage on a cargo ship to the so-called civilised world, but his fears and thoughts, his imagination and ideas are those of a thoughtful, soul-searching human being, someone who has spent time grappling with his sense of self.