Theatre is as healthy as we choose to make it

In a spotlight on a dark, spacious stage squats a most perculiar creature. Her (his?) face gleams with beads of well-earned sweat, their lip trembles, at once both utterly childlike and yet also wise and knowing of exactly what I will do. I hand her an empty glass bottle, which she takes, and she drinks from. She smiles an impish grin, and commands me back to my seat in a thunder of applause that she receives every time she improvises.

This is Kathryn Hunter, and I am the unwitting audience member dragged into her performance. Too nervous to step up when she stares at me and the bottle she handed at me earlier because I fear it may shatter something intangible and sublime, eventually I do, and my finger meets those of one of the country’s most acclaimed performers; a star of Shakespeare, one of the vanguards of some of the country’s most experimental theatre, and (for some reason the one credit constantly attached to her name) Arabella Figg in Harry Potter. Kathryn Hunter is a name you probably do not know, but you definitely should.

Two hours before every show of Kafka’s Monkey, her one-woman show about Red Peter (a monkey who has assimilated with humankind and is now delivering a lecture on his development to ‘the academy’, aka ourselves) Kathryn Hunter gets into character and will not be spoken to. She walks onto the stage as Red Peter as if she has just stopped performing and become herself it is such a natural fit. Her monkeyish eyes gaze out under a bowler hat as she performs an electifying hour of theatre.

**A strange surreal captivating story**

That’s how Kathryn summarises the play when I e-mailed her some questions. She sent back a series of dada-esque vox pops with odd and quirky mistakes that at first seem unnecessarily vexing, but in reality fit something in her manner as a performer. She improvises and recites with almost no difference in tone, she works a room like putty, and she is clearly having fun with the performance even after god knows how many nights so far. ‘Never assume its in the bag job done’ is another of her responses when I ask her about what she has learnt about professionalism and the ethos behind acting. This is a performance that is clearly still growing in tiny, subtle ways behind the complex but sensational physicality of the character. ‘Know what you want to express’, she said, and she does just that. I can say nothing here that you would not sense in her command of the text and of the character. In capitals, alone amongst her list of crucial traits for the actor she just writes one thing: WORK. And she works her backside off with every second of this performance.

**Take the work very seriously and yourself very unseriously**

The tale of Red Peter is one of an ape-like creature shot and captured by a German team and brought back on their steamer. In transit, Peter is inflicted to so much pain in captivity that all he has is to try and learn, because, as he says, you learn when you want to get out. Peter learns to shake hands, to smoke a pipe, to dance and even to drink rum before finally uttering his first word: ‘hello’. Throughout the tale we are asked to question what makes humanity such a pinnacle of a species, as Peter tries to replicate our coarse humour and our terrible habits, whilst desperate to become one of us and, at the same time, so upset at what he has lost and who he has had to become as he lives a lonely existence with only his Italian manager and a half-converted female chimp. When Kathryn wants you to feel sad, she does it in seconds, when she wants you to laugh, it is with equal ease and beauty.

**No such thing as non-physical theatre.
**
To call the piece physical theatre, as she says, is reductionist. Often to call theatre physical is to condemn it of lacking natural emotion, but she uses one to capture the other. To watch Kafka’s Monkey is a masterclass in acting.

**Unusual. Incomplete. Bold.**

This is how Kathryn Hunter summarises her career in three words. These are incredibly apropos, considering she is at the forefront of the British theatre scene, engrossed in RADA performances and the development of one of the country’s most established and exciting theatre companies, Complicite. Every move she takes on stage is the brushstroke of a master performer, creating a unique and captivating world on the stage with the barest of sets and the simplest of props. It is also a part that feels perfect for the career of an actor of her calibre; the performing monkey of Kafka’s simian creation steps up at the end of the show and, with Prospero-like melancholy and finality, speaks about how he had to learn to perform and be as human as possible to survive. As Kathryn takes her bow, it may be the sweat on her brow or her appreciation of our rapturous applause- not done as custom but as a real elemental surge of joy- but there is a gleam in those dark eyes that shows that maybe the monologue about trying to be the best masquerader of her species has a profound meaning to one of our country’s finest performers. Long may she reign as one of our duchesses of drama, and hope, beyond all hopes, that you get a chance to see this magician conjure up her next show.