Don't underestimate the power of solo performance at Edinburgh Fringe

Pleased to report that I have managed to do exactly that this year with the superb South ­African monodrama Kafka’s Ape ­(Summerhall, until August 26). This ­production, which is ­performed by Tony Bonani Miyambo and ­directed by Phala Ookeditse Phala for the Noma Yini theatre company, is based upon Franz ­Kafka’s 1917 short story A Report To An Academy.

In the story, “Red Peter” – an ape who has been “civilised” to the point where he has many of the perceived attributes (including spoken language) of a European human – is invited to address a learned academy. In his lecture, ­Peter details the agonising process by which his ­transformation was achieved.

Miyambo plays in the bare and ­unforgiving space of the Demonstration Room of ­Summerhall (which is, appropriately enough, the former ­zoology school of Edinburgh ­University). There, he is armed only with a walking stick (due to a bullet Peter took to his hip during his capture), a suitcase and a metal frame (on which hangs the banner of the “Species of the World ­Conference”, which carries the question, “what is the identity of an evolving man?”).

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The adapted text that the actor speaks is, by turns, powerfully evocative (not least of the cruelties human beings inflict on animals) and brilliantly insightful (as in Peter’s observation of the irony of humans forcing him to become one of them, while trapeze artists engage in a “mockery of sacred nature” as they attempt to become more like apes and monkeys).

That this theatricalisation of Kafka’s ­writing succeeds is down, in very large part, to ­Miyambo’s exceptional performance. Segueing compellingly between human and ape, his Peter is devastatingly eloquent when explaining that, certain that freedom was impossible, he opted for the “way out” presented by the performance hall (which was preferable, he says, to the new kind of cage offered by the zoo).

However, Peter’s verbal eloquence is tied to expressions of his repressed ape nature, ­ranging from the humorous (such as picking flees from the hair of audience members) to the ­emotive (such as screams of pain brought forth by ­memories of his past torture). As Miyambo ­unfurls his genuinely exceptional performance, it is impossible to avoid the significance of this piece being performed by a Black South African actor.

The pertinence of the play to the historic and ongoing dehumanisation of Black ­African people by European colonialism (including, of course, the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade) is a powerful implication throughout. Indeed, by the time Peter’s lecture has reached its shuddering, sobering ­conclusion, one is ­reminded of the famous moment when a ­journalist asked Mahatma Gandhi what he thought of Western civilisation, to which ­Gandhi replied: “I think it would be a good idea.”

Amy Conway in Catafalque

Also at Summerhall, and also deeply emotive is Catafalque (Summerhall, until August 11). A one-woman play by writer/performer Amy Conway, directed by Beth Morton for Scottish company Scissor Kick, the piece reflects on Conway’s experiences as a civil celebrant.

Like Kafka’s Ape, the piece is a work of ­modestly funded fringe theatre. It is played on a bare stage, save for the coffin that sits at the back of the performance space and the ­celebrant’s lectern at which Conway performs from time to time.

The script is structured in two distinct, ­ultimately interconnecting sections. In the first, the fictional celebrant, Fern, outlines the ­professional and personal worlds of the civil ­celebrant (complete with anthropological knowledge of various human cultures’ means of coping with bereavement).

In the second, Fern encounters a mother whose initial reluctance to talk about the life of her recently deceased 52-year-old son is an attempt to avoid the truth of his long history of sexual abuse of children. What begins as a moral dilemma for the celebrant becomes ­something unavoidably and painfully personal.

At its most powerful, Conway’s writing ­expresses the life-changing (indeed, ­life-stopping) impact of child sexual abuse. The script has an undeniable combination of insight, anguish and rage that culminates in a heart-rending image.

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Sad to say – given the force and empathy of the text – one can’t help but observe that ­Conway is more convincing as a writer than she is as an actor. During Friday’s performance, the momentum of the piece was undermined by her tripping over a number of lines.

The same is true of the combination of ­lighting, music and sound (which seems to have ambitions beyond the production’s restricted budget). Although the stage effects succeed in some moments, they are often intrusive and ­distracting.

All of which is to say that this is a heartfelt and poignant piece of stage writing that is ­crying out for a production that rises to its considerable moral and emotional challenges.

There is certainly no lack of production values in Batshit (Traverse, until August 25), Australian theatre-maker Leah Shelton’s reflection on the history of pathologising of female mental health, which is receiving its European premiere on the Fringe. The piece is inspired by the story of her grandmother, Gwen, who was incarcerated – and subjected to repressive and counterproductive treatment – in a ­neo-Victorian mental health institution in Western Australia in the 1960s.

The production combines narrative ­theatre with performance art, and is assisted by ­carefully curated video clips. Shelton ­considers both her grandmother’s terrible (but not ­particularly unusual) case and the centuries-old history of women being designated “crazy” or “hysterical” by dint of their biology (indeed, as the writer/performer reminds us, the Latin origin of the word “hysteria” is a “suffering in the uterus”).

Leah Shelton in Batshit

The piece is played on a brilliantly realised, hyper-real set that evokes simultaneously the coldly clinical mental institution, the deceptively comfortable psychiatrist’s office and the seemingly reassuring domesticity of the 1960s Australian family home. At the outset – and on numerous occasions throughout the show – Shelton offers visually distinctive theatrical set pieces.

Some – such as her initial appearance in a glamorous ball gown and blonde wig with a medical gag in her mouth and an axe in a ­prosthetic hand – are powerfully effective and, through her performance, darkly comic. Others – like her metaphorical representation of Gwen disappearing into a psychiatrist’s couch – are more obvious and, therefore, less effective.

Nonetheless, whether she is playing a psychiatrically repressed Gwen or putting reductively diagnostic questions to audience members, ­Shelton is an absolutely enthralling ­performer. One wonders why the show’s director, ­acclaimed performance artist Ursula ­Martinez, didn’t suggest extending the piece beyond its mere 50 minutes,

Alternating, as it does, between ­performative vignettes, storytelling, superbly illustrated ­lecture and, ultimately, bold polemic, the show seems somewhat too short for the material it is carrying. One might wish for more storytelling or ­additional historical argumentation, but – as Shelton points out during her final, enraged ­monologue – when the far-right, white, male ­candidates for president and vice-president of the US are denouncing their Black and Asian female opponent as “crazy” and a “childless cat lady”, anger is a more than justified ­response.