Stage-to-screen review: Great Apes

Remember that time when Will Self was a team captain on Shooting Stars? It's a thing that actually happened (I googled it and it's definitely not just something I dreamed) but feels about as surreal and unlikely as one of the novelist's plots. Great Apes is one his best-loved books but also one based on one of his most bizarre and complex high concepts; essentially unstageable, which in some ways makes it inevitable that someone would attempt to stage it. Two decades after the book's publication the Arcola gave it a go, and director Oscar Pearce has shared an archive recording of the 2018 production to add to the list of lockdown theatre available. Over the millennia human beings have found their way to the top of the evolutionary tree, and with dominance comes a sense of superiority and the assumption that our instincts and behaviours are the ones that make sense.

Self's satire punctures this idea by suggesting how easy it could have been for things to go a different way, if a different primate beat us to language and organised society.

It's something Turner prize-winning artist Simon (Bryan Dick) finds out first hand while preparing for his new show to open; recently divorced and having lost custody of his children, he goes on a coke-fuelled night out and wakes up the next morning to discover his girlfriend (Vivienne Smith) has been replaced by a chimpanzee. It's not just her: Chimps are the dominant species and always have been, and despite his protestations to the contrary he's told he too is a chimpanzee. The chimp who believes himself to be human is isolated in a psychiatric ward and becomes a real head-scratcher for the doctors, who can't get through to him with friendly, socialising behaviour like touching his anus and violently beating him up, so the eccentric Dr Zach Busner (Ruth Lass) takes over.

Great Apes is adapted for the stage by Patrick Marmion, who wrote The Divided Laing, also at the Arcola, and you can see the through-line here as Busner is a follower of the discredited psychiatrist RD Laing*. He wants to indulge Simon's human delusion, while also getting him to move in with him and his pack, in the hope that being immersed in chimp social structure will make him remember who he is. Movement director Jonnie Riordan and chimp consultant Peter Elliott have come up with an almost-but-not-quite-literal chimp movement style for the cast which is one of the main ways it sells its alternate universe, and the physical and sexual displays that mark out the complex hierarchy of this society is a recurring theme (although having a character present their arse to an Alpha is only funny so many times.)

The story has inevitably been cut down a lot (the book's ongoing theme of racism against bonobos is gone entirely) but still feels a bit overloaded as we end up a bit distracted by a subplot about Busner's obsequious researcher (John Cummins) trying to take his place; given Simon is our audience representative it's surprising how many long stretches we spend without Dick on stage (and I think it's well-documented how I feel about seeing Dick on stage.) The production also probably suffers from the transition to screen as its frantic physical style feels like something you really needed to be thrown into to get the full effect†. Still, the gist of the show's odd brand of existential comedy comes through, and it's worth a look at a flawed but admirable attempt to stage the unstageable.

Great Apes by Patrick Marmion, based on the novel by Will Self, is available on Oscar Pearce's YouTube channel.

Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.

Photo credit: Nick Rutter.

*Marmion isn't even the only person involved to have Laing as a recurring theme in their work, as Lass went on to appear in last year's excellent revival of the Laing-influenced Equus.

†there's also a distraction in the fact that Dick spends most of the first act barefoot, and as is so often the case where tatoos are concerned people certainly make some... choices.