Meet Red Peter, the character at the heart of the award-nominated Camden Fringe Festival hit, which returns to London for a March run at the VAULT Festival. Time to book your tickets!
The stage adaptation of Franz Kafka‘s A Report to an Academy runs at The Vaults from 6 to 8 March 2020.
An ape has been captured in the jungles of West Africa and brought back to ‘civilization’ by his European captors. To escape a life of incarceration, he ‘evolves’ into a human being. Red Peter, as he is known, mimics human habits from the crew of the ship upon which he is imprisoned, masters human speech and eventually decides to embrace human society rather than languish in a zoo as an ape. He presents to an academy to give a report about his former life.
In examining the ‘forced’ evolution of an ape into a human, Kafka explores what it is to be human from an outsider’s perspective. In doing so he exposes modern man’s isolation and solitude through the mind of an ape. Red Peter’s confession about how hard it is to constantly present himself as human to the human world can be seen as a metaphor for the problems faced by the many minority communities in contemporary society, whether they define themselves by nationality, race, religion, culture, gender or sexuality.
Red Peter production images
Grid Theatre first performed director Chris Yun-Ward‘s production at the Edinburgh Festival in 2003. They revived it last summer, when it ran at the Etcetera Theatre in August as part of the Camden Fringe Festival. Dancer, choreographer and actor Denzil Barnes, who starred in the 2019 production, returns for the VAULT Festival run of Red Peter.
Billed as “London’s biggest, boldest and wildest arts and entertainment festival,” in 2019, VAULT Festival attracted more than 79,000 audience members to see 428 different shows staged by more than 2,000 artists. In 2020, it runs from 28 January to 22 March 2020, with an eclectic line-up of shows.
Red Peter trailer
