Actor Tony Miyambo
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 for all intents and purposes 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 in order to figure out what it in fact 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 own sense of self.
It is an existential zooming in, an act of storytelling that is also the presentation of a man contemplating his own nature, scratching at the surface of his identity, conveying through a detailed spoken account of his own tragic history a strong sense of the duality of being human.
As he breathes life into Kafka’s Red Peter, Miyambo transforms his humanised ape into a representative of repressed, suppressed, captured and forced-to-comply humans everywhere. His telling of how he came to be an “evolved ape”, who not only talks and comports himself comfortably within human society, but has (mostly) abandoned his apeness, is described as an often distressing process of domestication — through capture, violence, imprisonment, enslavement, torture, abuse and, finally, a decision to act and become human himself in order to beat his human captors at their own game.
Red Peter the ape thus becomes a kind of everyman, albeit with a wit and insight and intellectual acuity that’s impressively superior and far from average or ordinary.
The show’s director, Phala Ookeditse Phala, who also adapted Kafka’s story for the stage, has imbued the text with local and specific resonance, deepening its message of how one group of humans might operate to suppress and dominate another.
Phala draws on parallels between theatrical monologue and African oral storytelling traditions and erases the fourth wall with close-up interactions between Miyambo and the audience. And he has added touches that simply and effectively convey the work into the present moment using snatches of contemporary business, such as the mildly hilarious Covid-era obsession with personal hygiene.
The play says so much without overstatement. There are embedded links to slavery, to countless acts of oppressive subjugation and socio-political control, to the horrors of apartheid and to the myriad crimes of racial and cultural indoctrination that exist in a world of hierarchies imposed by whomever holds power. It is 50 minutes, but it contains a vast universe of feelings and memories, shared and personal.
What’s unavoidable, too, is the play’s implicit indictment of cultural, ethnic and racial othering and Eurocentrism which are at the heart of the colonial project, and which for centuries have enabled one group of humans to exercise authority over another. Rather than talking politics and policy, however, Miyambo’s Red Peter expresses his own personal pain, sadness and anguish at these various mechanisms of social enslavement. Instead of a wordy discourse, what the audience experiences is the very real grief experienced by a being who has had to abandon his “apeness” for the sake of survival.
What’s deeply disarming, too, is Miyambo’s dexterity as a performer and his incredible attention to the minutiae of physical technique. There’s the way, for example, that he stands and walks almost throughout the play on the balls of his feet. It must be, I thought while studying his raised heels and considering the physical implications of this tiny detail, incredibly tiring, a relentless demand on the toes and calf muscles, and yet the way this technical detail gave a certain lightness to his body, helped shift his centre of gravity, brought such depth to the physical performance.
Indeed, the play works to convey how uncomfortable it must be to inhabit the skin of another, to be an ape in a human’s body, wearing human clothing when you’re a wild creature raised in nature, swinging naked and free through the treetops. Or, indeed, how unpleasant it is to wear any of the many outward markers of socialisation, of civilisation, of conformity, all the masks and shackles we carry around with us in order to comply with the status quo.
Judging by the way my own heart was pounding by the end of the show, from the sighs and tongue-clicks and occasional cries of agreement or disbelief or shock from the audience, and from the sobbing and tears-down-the-cheeks of the woman in the seat next to me, this is indeed a rare and deeply powerful performance. It is in fact a full-on masterclass in what theatre can and should be — not merely an enactment or show, but a ritual of becoming, of getting lost in the moment.
Miyambo’s performance is spirited, absorbing, ceaselessly watchable — it is astonishing to witness him giving himself over to his character, getting lost in the role with such fearless abandon.
Someone recently reminded me that theatre needs to be brave, that building a theatre industry and creating a sustainable theatre culture requires artists to act with bravery. If Kafka’s Ape is not brave, I don’t know what is.
Kafka’s Ape runs at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town until 12 April.
