TEHRAN – Homa Theater in Tehran is hosting the solo performance “A Report to an Academy” by Franz Kafka.

Maedeh Tahmasebi has directed the play and Farhad Aeesh is the only performer of the one-hour show, which remains on stage for a month. 

A short story by Franz Kafka, written and published in 1917, “A Report to an Academy” is about an ape named Red Peter, who has learned to behave like a human. The ape presents to an academy the story of how he effected his transformation. 

In the play, the narrator, speaking before a scientific conference, describes his former life as an ape. His story begins in a West African jungle, where a hunting expedition shoots and captures him. Caged on a ship for his voyage to Europe, he finds himself for the first time without the freedom to move as he will. Needing to escape from this situation, he studies the habits of the crew and imitates them with surprising ease. Throughout the story, the narrator reiterates that he learned his human behavior not out of any desire to be human, but only to provide himself with a means of escape from his cage.

Upon arriving in Europe, the ape realizes that he is faced with a choice between the “Zoological Garden” and the “Music Hall,” and devotes himself to becoming human enough to become an able performer. He accomplishes this with the help of many teachers and reports to the academy that his transformation is so complete that he can no longer properly describe his emotions and experiences as an ape. In concluding, the ape expresses a degree of satisfaction with his lot.

The story's references to the protagonist's “apish past” have led some literary theorists to associate the story with evolutionary theory.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was a German-language Czech writer and novelist born in Prague, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature, his work fuses elements of realism and the fantastique, and typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surreal predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. 

The term Kafkaesque has entered the lexicon to describe bizarre situations like those depicted in his writing. The domain of mystical parables overlaps with the alienating experience of urban life's indecipherable complexities in these stories. His best-known works include the novella “The Metamorphosis” (1915) and the novels “The Trial” (1924) and “The Castle” (1926).

Though the novels and short stories that Kafka wrote are typically invoked in his précis, he is also celebrated for his brief fables and aphorisms. Like his longer fiction, these sketches may be brutal in some aspects, but their dreadfulness is frequently funny. 

Kafka's impact is evident in the frequent reception of his writing as a form of prophetic or premonitory vision, anticipating the character of a totalitarian future in the nightmarish logic of his presentation of the lived present. These perceptions appear in the way that he renders the world inhabited by his characters and in his commentaries written in diaries, letters, and aphorisms.

Homa Hall is located at Ziba Dead-End, Nofel Loshato St., Hafez St.

SS/SAB