What makes a human being, human? What makes an ape, an ape? Is it at all possible to draw a conclusive line between these two animal species in order to define one as superior to the other? These are some of the central questions at play in Kafka’s Ape, a performance now playing at Infinithéâtre. The show is based on Franz Kafka’s short story, A Report to an Academy, and was adapted and directed by Guy Sprung.
In A Report to an Academy, published in the war-ravaged Germany of 1917, an ape is captured in the jungles of Africa by a European hunting expedition. The ape, realizing that only by imitating the bizarre behaviour of his captors can he have any chance of escaping the confinement of his cage, strives to repress his ape identity, and take on a human one. His captors deem his efforts successful, and the metamorphosed ape is accordingly celebrated as a unique variety act all over Europe.
In Guy Sprung’s adaptation, the ape, named Redpeter, culminates his parallel journey from ape to man as a distinguished member of the private security industry, a euphemism for his engagement as a mercenary with a major privatized military company. Sprung’s contemporization of Kafka’s story posits the world-wide expansion of this industry as the appalling zenith of the human species’ relentless desire for wealth and success. In the Director’s Note addressed to the audience, Sprung warns us that “Redpeter has been assimilated into one of the most heinous occupations the Homo sapiens has embraced on its evolutionary journey, that of privatizing the killing and the subjugating of other human beings—for profit.”
Montreal actors Howard Rosenstein and Alexandra Montagnese play the parts of Redpeter and his ape-wife, and have both undergone intensive instruction by movement coaches Anana Rydvald and Zach Fraser, in order to correctly imitate the apes’ natural motions. Thus, just as Redpeter had to repress the ape within himself to become human, the actors have had to undertake a similar obscuring of their instinctive human movements and behaviours. The important difference is, of course, that for Rosenstein and Montagnese their transformation is transient, confined to the limits of the play.
Set and costume designer Ariane Genet de Miomandre, and make-up designer Vladimir Alexandru Cara, make the actors’ transformation from man to ape complete. The overall effect is not only highly convincing, but unnerving: Redpeter emerges as a character in which the boundaries between ape and man have become alarmingly unstable.
Metamorphosis, a common topic for Kafka, thus operates at many different levels within the play: at one level, as described, a man plays an ape who transforms into a man. But the metamorphosis doesn’t stop there. Not only does the ape have to transform irreversibly from his natural animal self in order to take on a human identity, but subsequently, to be considered a successful member of the species of Homo sapiens, the ape has to distort the very human nature he has attained, and consciously flout fundamental principles of humanity.
The irony of this last transformation is painfully obvious: in documenting the ape’s journey, it is not the superiority of the human race that is revealed, but its immorality, its inhumanity.
Infinithéâtre’s production of Kafka’s Ape runs until Feb. 17 at Bain St. Michel (5300 St-Dominique). Student tickets $20.
