Double bill – Book tickets for Kafka’s Ape at 7pm and Ed Gaughan – Words & Music at 9pm for only £18. Discount will be applied automatically on standard priced tickets.
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“One-man show cracks head, then heart, wide open.” by Capo Cassidy, Call Off Search, South Africa.
“Kafka’s Ape addresses racism in a tour de force performance.” Ong Sor Fern, Senior Culture Correspondent, The Straits times, Singapore.
“Using Kafka’s language and his own primate embodiment, Miyambo brings us to the hunt that captured him, then we’re feeling his anguish and pain in all our senses as he’s trapped in a crate.” Mark Wickett, Stage Whispers, Australia.
Directed by Phala Ookeditse Phala and performed by Tony Bonani Miyambo, Kafka’s Ape is a rich adaptation of a profound and wide-ranging text combined with a powerful physical performance. Miyambo embodies the character of the ape and the anguish and oppression that he labours under.
This internationally renowned adaptation of Czech author Franz Kafka’s short story, “A Report to an Academy,” is set in South Africa. In this version Phala and Miyambo highlight the complexities of identity in the twenty-first century and invite us to explore, through an animal’s gaze, the relationship between self and other. It is a performance that, through the seemingly simple binaries of human and animal, begins to pick apart the complicated relationship between the self and the other, and the self as other.
While Kafka’s original story tests the notions of identity, assimilation, and survival, Phala’s adaptation ultimately reckons with the unending complexities of identity in the contemporary world. It is a performance that continuously returns to the key themes of otherness, inhumanity, alienation, dissociation, and the unbearable reality of not being at home in one’s own body.
Since its inception over a decade ago, Kafka’s Ape has travelled to countries across the globe and has been performed alongside a plethora of critical moments in recent history. The realities of xenophobia, racism, animal cruelty, genocide, and more have all been absorbed and grappled with by the play throughout its years of touring.
Tickets: £11/ £13/ £15 from oldfirestation.org.uk
Part of the Humanities Division's Programme for #OxfordReadsKafka | Two award-winning shows translate Kafka's dark parable of un-belonging for the modern day. Kafka's story 'A Report for an Academy' finds its way into blistering explorations of race and migration, and grownup reflections on aging, migration, and humanimal agency, at the same time metamorphising prose into drama and stand-up comedy. Kafka as you've never seen or heard him before.
