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.