Ever woken up after a heavy night out and felt that things were a little... off? That’s what happens to Simon Dykes: a drug-loving, Turner Prize-winning London artist who goes on a coke-and-pills binge and wakes the next morning to find that everyone around him has become an ape. Yes, this is a kind of ‘Planet of the Apes’, as seen through the weird old mind of Will Self.
Playwright and journalist Patrick Marmion has adapted Self’s 1997 book ‘Great Apes’ – it’s the first of the novelist’s works to be made into a play. And it’s a fascinating premise. Here on stage, though, the results are mixed.
The first ten to 15 minutes are a fragmented, nightmarish soup of partying, drugs, an Uber home and frenzied sex. Movement and music replace dialogue. The audience waits for the crescendo: the realisation from Simon that his girlfriend is now a hairy primate. It arrives, and when four chimp paramedics storm the stage to incarcerate our protagonist that pure horror we’re waiting for is there, you can feel it. But the satire that follows isn’t quite what that great build-up promises.
Simon is taken in to the care of eminent psychiatrist Zack Busner and the world as run by chimps slowly reveals itself – sex is a public activity that plays out in groups on Hampstead Heath, greetings are made by presenting and touching each other’s arses, and the system of social hierarchy makes Britain’s class structure look, well, ‘tame’.
The audience generally seemed to love the copious chimp-human wordplay (of course, someone at some point talks of going ‘human-shit’) but after a while it felt superficial, almost a distraction, to me. Satire is most powerful when it is so-true-it-hurts. ‘Great Apes’ doesn’t manage to find that deeper resonance. And despite the occasional modern-day reference, it also felt oddly lacking in contemporary commentary. Simon himself could have been sent up far more – especially in this Dalston venue.
The pace of Oscar Pearce’s production is brisk and the story zips by – you certainly won’t be bored. I also found the small parts with puppetry – Simon is plagued by a child-like apparition – really quite haunting. But despite all the apes, and their hooting and fighting, what this play needed was a lot more bite.