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kafka's monkey
Review

kafka's monkey

April 25 2009

Kafka’s Monkey, Sydney Theatre Company – Wharf 2; April 15-25; www.sydneytheatre.com.au

TRANSFORMATION is the obvious theme running through the two distinguished visitors of the past couple of weeks: Metamorphosis and this extraordinary 50 minutes of theatre magic, Kafka’s Monkey. It’s neatly appropriate too – for a company in transition and transformation.

Presented in conjunction with Arts Projects Australia, the piece is based on Kafka’s 1917 short storyA Report to an Academy. It was adapted for the stage by Colin Teevan and first staged in March this year at the Young Vic in London. It’s a solo vehicle for the celebrated English actor/director Kathryn Hunter and she’s mesmerising to watch – you need to see and know more.

Hunter has made a name for herself most recently in taking on the out-of-the-ordinary. She has played King Lear and other male characters and has worked with the physical theatre companies Complicite and Shared Experience. So, to assume the role of an ape who becomes a man but, in many ways, is somewhere in between, is neither a stretch of the imagination nor a stretch for her remarkable abilities as a physical and cerebral performer.

Hunter lopes shyly into the spotlight, ready to deliver a lecture to the “distinguished members of the Academy” (the audience). The ape-become-man, who has reluctantly taken on the persona of Red Peter and become a vaudeville performer, tells of capture in the jungles of West Africa, dreadful incarceration on a ship and the journey to England and life as a spectacle. Dressed in ill-fitting white tie and tails and with an incongruous black bowler hat on his head, Red Peter muses on his choices – a zoo or the music hall stage – and tells us that after five years self-education he has “reached the cultural level of an average European.” Not that he thinks that says very much that’s good.

kafka's monkey

Mordant wit and deep poignancy vie for first place in Red Peter’s armoury of human traits. To survive the voyage from ape to England he had to forget his previous life and take on what he found around him: rum and base behaviour. But his humanity is not fixed and there is a simian essence that remains. The constantly shape-shifting performance by Hunter is all the more remarkable because this is subtly suggested. Red Peter has left behind the indignity of the music halls and is anxious to present himself to the Academy with considered decoru.

The result is disturbing, funny and – ultimately – tragic. The production was directed by Young Vic associate Walter Meierjohann, with movement choreographed by Ilan Reichel. The simple setting – empty space with lectern and two bananas, a large screen on which is projected a forlorn image of a young chimp – was designed bySteffi Wurster, and the soundscape was devised by Nikola Kodjabashia.

The magnetic focus of attention, however, is Hunter. Her loose-limbed movement, sly humour and febrile, wide-eyed demeanour are underpinned by a piteous nobility that is utterly affecting. Having been out of the country for the start of its run, I caught up with Kafka’s Monkey on the second-last performance. It was a profound experience and a privilege.

 

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