'Great Apes' Licking Arse But Not Asking Who We Are..Nina Conti's Monkey does it all!

Will Self's 'Great Apes' - a lack of meaning, Nina Conti's 'Monkey' does the existential...

Just been to Will Self's play at the Arcola 'Great Apes'. I am not the typical person to see this play, indeed I am not sure who Will Self is aiming at. I am a science teacher who studied zoology at Imperial College, and who has H.G.Wells as a hero, an alumni of my college. He, as a teacher, and as a trained biologist knew how to explore science with art, with short stories and novels. He did so because he was passionate about how powerful science could be to change the world, but how it was destroyed by the soulless training and cramming for exams that is still the heart of Imperial. He destroys it in a short story called 'Argonauts of the Air' about the first mechanised flight losing control over London and crashing on the college. The memorial to the working class, self taught engineer and the wealthy innovative patron is the ruins of the college and student union. I organised a debate with 'This House Believes Imperial College is a threat to Liberal Education and should be blown-up'. We had the pro-rector defending the college, alongside the then president of the students union, and criticising the college were ex-Union President and LWT presenter Trevor Phillips, and ex-Union President and first woman secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, who turned it from a political party into a think tank, Nina Temple. The audience voted to destroy the college!

'Great Apes' is an attempt to explore the nature of the human. 'Cries from the Mammal House', 'The Physicists', 'Island of Dr Moreau', 'Frankenstein', Brecht's 'Galileo' all succeed in engaging us with how science effects our sense of identity and relationship with the world. Phillip Glass's 'Galileo', Tom Stoppard's 'The Hard Problem' and 'Great Apes' fail. They feel like productions done by intellectual writers who unlike Wells treat their subjects as an intellectual exercise, with no passion, just the cutting humour and satire of their intellect. Wells writes because of his awareness of what is at stake and how it relates to the nature of science's interaction with us and our nature. At the end of the 'Island of Dr Moreau', on which there are populations of Frankenstein created animals, carved and moulded into human characters, the escaped sailor walks in London, shockingly starting to see in the faces of the Londoners the animals from the Island. A frightening end. The story works despite its weakness in scientific theory.

'Great Apes' plays with the themes of The Island of Dr Moreau, and Planet of the Apes. Its details of chimp behaviour make it watchable and entertaining. There are moments of horror, the skinning of a live human by poachers. But the imposition onto chimp hierarchy behaviour, challenging each other physically, exhibitionism to see who is the alpha male, and the sexual displays and hormonal triggered multiple mating is an impossible contrast with their talk of art, therapy and Freud. As satire on the power structures of the successful intellectuals and the arse licking of underlings seeking promotion or seeking to destroy their competitors, it is very funny, but this is rather a facile reason to write a play with such a trope. 

Brecht's 'Galileo' smashes the glass spheres and the golden chain of being that is the power structure supporting class and priests and the ultimate authority of the Pope. Glass's 'Galileo' is a mesmerising portrayal of a wondrous solar system and physics without the revolutionary power of turning the world upside down. Tarzan and 'The Island of Dr Moreau' remind us how inhumane our arrogance is and how our violence is so thinly disguised through 'civilisation'. 'Great Apes' gives us an entertaining night and a lot of laughs but nothing really to think about, except maybe why it was written and does Will Self have a strong need to write about science and how we see ourselves.

If you want to laugh and be faced with spontaneous comedy exploring the relationship between creator and created then rush out and see Nina Conti at the Soho Theatre. Her experiment, with monkey, is a sheer delight, as it is her improvisation with the audience that gets us to think of the big questions and their personal meanings... and it is genuine comedy.

To end on a good note, the dialogue is well scripted, it is a fine production, a great use of body language, stylistic costumes, and engrossing acting.