Kafka's Ape

In your human world you see only so much less but you claim so much knowledge.
Experience is not what happens to someone but what one does with what happens to them.

This internationally renowned adaptation of Czech author Franz Kafka's short story, 'A Report to an Academy', is set in South Africa. Adapted by Phala Ookeditse Phala and originally performed by Tony Bonani Miyambo, this adaptation highlights 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 play 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. 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 are explored within the play through its years of touring.

This edition was published to coincide with the NOMA YINI production at Summerhall during Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2024.

Auteur

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian Jewish novelist and writer from Prague. He is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature.

Phala Ookeditse Phala is a multi-award-winning storiyer: a theatre-maker, director and dramaturge whose works have won awards in South Africa, USA, Czech Republic and Australia. His works champion emotional and psychologically-stimulating storying as a uniquely African aesthetic. His focus and interest are on methodologies of making and creating work in ways that collapse and disrupt conventional norms.

Tony Bonani Miyambo works as a freelancer in the television and theatre industries and is an Artist in Residence at the Centre for the Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape. Over his career, Tony has been part of numerous theatre productions, some of which have toured all over the world. His body of work includes acclaimed solo performances The Cenotaph of Dan Wa Moriri, Commission Continua, and Kafka's Ape, which has won: 2015 Silver Ovation Award at the National Arts Festival; 2017 NHISS Best Public Performance Award; 2019 Outstanding Performance Award at The Prague Fringe Festival; 2019 Best Satire Award at the United Solo Festival in New York; 2020 Best Theatre Award for week 3 at the Fringe Word festival; 2020 Graham F. Smith Peace Foundation Award at the Adelaide Fringe Festival. Tony was also awarded the 2012 Brett Goldin Award and studied with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford Upon Avon, UK.