KAFKA`S APE – Franz Kafka´s Short Story In South Africa´s Reality

Adapted and directed by Phala Ookeditse Phala and performed by Tony Bonani Miyambo, Kafka’s Ape is a rich adaptation that combines a profound and nuanced expansive text 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 several 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.
This production has won awards in South Africa, Czech Republic, Australia, USA and Scotland.