Kafka’s Monkey, Theatre Royal Winchester WITH absorbing dark eyes, unfathomable bodily contortions and an unrecognisable linguistic rhythm, Red Peter is an ape-turned-human with a story to tell.

Taken captive from his home on the Gold Coast and locked away in a cage, Red Peter’s only means of escape is to stop being an ape and adopt the characteristics of his captors. Kafka’s Monkey comes five years later as Red Peter presents reports of transformation from ape to human to ’the academy’, which in this instance was an adoring audience at the Theatre Royal Winchester.

Shuffling onto the stage with bowed legs and low hanging arms, from the very first moment Kathryn Hunter, as Red Peter, looks up to absorb the audience through deep spherical eyes, there is little doubt that the character was once in fact a monkey.

Mesmeric in this solo performance, Hunter transforms every inch of her body to give a startlingly realistic portrayal of the cheeky primate. She skilfully punctuates Red Peter’s childlike stories of how he mastered human skills such as spitting, drinking and speaking with sequences of ape-like movement barely recognisable as human.

Pathos and comedy intertwine throughout endearing the audience to the vulnerable creature now torn between the worlds of humanity and ape. The audience participation was perhaps a step too far, however, tediously breaking the flow of the narrative. Based on Franz Kafka’s A Report to an Academy, Kafka’s Monkey is as poignant as Hunter’s ape impersonation is impressive.