Kafka’s Ape rises spectacularly to our current political moment

At the beginning of Kafka’s Ape, playing at The Baxter Theatre until 12 April 2025, both the house lights and the stage lights go down, and the audience hears grunts, snorks and whispers from the corner of the stage.

This comes from Red Peter the ape reciting some of the key thematic motifs of the show in a low, growling voice: “What is the identity of an evolving man?” “My skin is not necessarily my truth but my biological make-up.” “I deliberately did not say fre-”

Suddenly, the stage lights go on and Red Peter realises that he is being watched. He stands on a stage with a lectern at its centre, in front of a banner declaring: “SPECIES OF THE WORLD CONFERENCE: What is the identity of an evolving man?” 

The premise of the show is simple: Red Peter, an ape, has been invited to an academic conference to give a talk to the academy (the audience) about his previous life as an ape. He has spent the past five years learning human speech and behaviour to avoid the life of a captured zoo animal. He chose another cage instead: “The performance hall.” The premise is simple, but the impact of the show is everything but. 

One of the key reasons for this is the actor inhabiting Red Peter: Tony Miyambo. This reviewer first saw Miyambo perform this show when it was a student production in 2010. Back then, Miyambo was younger and more lithe, and he was able to perform and embody the physical acrobatics of an ape fighting his ape instincts very well. 

Fifteen years later, his body is no longer the same, but Miyambo and director Phala O Phala have taken advantage of this limitation and made it an integral part of the character.

The Red Peter of 2025 is much more browbeaten and defeated. The physical elegance and self-assuredness with which Miyambo executed the character’s walk and jumps, and swinging from a bar nine years ago when I last saw the show in Johannesburg are no longer there. The elegance is replaced by a physical vocabulary that speaks of oppressed fatigue and a longing to stop fighting both the outside world and himself. 

This is a superior performance to the ones I have seen Miyambo give in the past and it would most likely not have been possible had he not been playing the role for the past 15 years. 

Beyond the physicality, Miyambo’s Red Peter is still dignified despite everything that humans have done to him. Red Peter may be sadder, but there is an acceptance that Miyambo portrays so well; it tells the audience that even though Red Peter hates his nightly performances, “the way out (not freedom)” that the performance hall has afforded him truly is the lesser of two evils.

The show is based on a 1917 short story, A Report to an Academy, by Franz Kafka and, as with all things Kafka, the simplicity of the story hides layers of complexity that speak intimately to the universal human experience. 

The Zoo or The Performance hall, Kafka's Ape directed by Phala O Phala and performed by Tony Bonani Miyambo. (Image: Courtesy of the Baxter Theatre)