“Hohe Herren von der Akademie! (Honoured Members of the Academy!) You have done me the honour of inviting me to give you an account of the life I formerly led as an ape…”

So begins Franz Kafka’s masterful short story A Report To An Academy.

Red Peter, the performing chimpanzee, is a star. He has taken the Variety Stage by storm and the world is at his feet. Invited to speak at The Academy, he now stands, dressed in his finest Top and Tails before the greatest thinkers of the age and tells his life story. It is the story of how an Ape learned to ape Man.

Young Vic International Associate Director Walter Meierjohann’s bold new production takes Kafka’s playful set-up a step further. Red Peter is performed by the acclaimed British actress and founding member of the extraordinary Theatre de Complicite, Kathryn Hunter: a woman playing a monkey playing a man…

Deeply theatrical, witty and absurd, Kafka’s Monkey places a profound and startling mirror in front of a modern-day audience and reveals a world in which humans appear apish and apes the more humane.