Rendering 6: Theatre

The article 'She's playing a chimp who's playing a man' was published on the website of 'The NewYork Times' on March 28, 2013. It is written by Alexis Soloski.

The aim of the article is to acquaint the reader with an actress Kathryn Hunter, who has quite a strange role in a new play. The play is Colin Teevan’s adaptation of the Franz Kafka story “A Report to an Academy,” where Ms. Hunter stars as Red Peter, a West African chimp who is enslaved by sailors and adapts the speech and mannerisms of his captors to survive. He then becomes a sensation on the music hall stage.

The author gives a brief biography of this actress. She was born in New York City to Greek immigrant parents but grew up in England. After studying drama and French at Bristol University, she then trained at the celebrated Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Further Alexis Soloski reports that Red Peter is not the most exotic role Ms. Hunter, but the most difficult. The reader gets to know that Kathryn has played commedia dell’arte fools, Richard III and a Japanese businessman, King Lear and an autistic 11-year-old in Lee Hall’s “Spoonface Steinberg”. In a production of “The Winter’s Tale” by Complicité, she starred not only as Paulina, but also as the old shepherd and the doomed youth Mamilius. But the hardest part she ever took on was the sex- and age-appropriate Cleopatra in “Antony and Cleopatra”, which Ms. Hunter, who is barely 5 feet and very slight, played in 2010.

As for the new play, the authors tell the reader that Ms. Hunter studied chimpanzee skeletal structure, watched videos of chimps at play and visited several zoos in order to get the feel of Red Peter. Another challenge was not just to play a chimpanzee, but to play a chimp pretending to be a man.

The article ends with quotation describing the actress: “Kathryn is simply one of the best actors in the world.” And of course, I can't but fully agree with it. As Kathryn Hunter has played so many unique characters and has transformed into a boy, an old man, Cleopatra and even a chimp. It's fantastic! I think this woman is really talanted, because not every actor or actress is able to transform into an opposite sex or even into an animal. I wish I Could watch one of the plays starring with her.