One woman and Kafka’s Monkey take to Warwick Arts Centre stage

Kafka’s Monkey, starring Olivier award-winning actress Kathryn Hunter, will be coming to the arts centre from Wednesday to Friday, following a sell-out run at the Old Vic.

The play is an adaptation by playwright Colin Teevan of Franz Kafka’s story A Report to an Academy, which has been considered a satirical take on the assimilation of Jews into society, a debunking of the Darwinian theory of evolution and the supremacy of humans or a treatise on colonialism.

In it, Hunter, the first female actor to play Othello and who appeared as Arabella Figg in Harry Potter, plays a lecturer reminiscing about his former life as an ape. The ape-man reveals his rise through the ranks of the beasts to become a walking, talking, spitting, smoking, hard-drinking man of the stage.

After the performance there will be a discussion by Hunter and a panel of academics on the human attitudes towards animals.

Tickets cost £15 or £9 for under 26s.