Only a phenomenal actress — I use the politically incorrect but gender-aware noun for emphasis — could take the role of a male ape who believes his sole chance of survival is to become a male human being.

Kathryn Hunter proves just such a performer in Colin Teevan’s adaptation and Walter Meierjohann’s production of Franz Kafka’s allegoric short story, A Report to an Academy.

Having convincingly played King Lear, Richard III and a female transvestite in Sebastian Barry’s Whistling Psyche, Miss Hunter settles into the apedom of Kafka’s case of anthropomorphosis with the nonchalant ease of someone used to leaping gender and human barriers.

As the former ape, Red Peter, now passing himself off as a human, Hunter proves technically brilliant but too eager to tug our heart-strings.

Attired in the top-hatted, white tie and tails of smart humanity, she looks eerily simian, too, as she snatches and eats the odd flea from an audience member’s head, as if to prove there’s still a touch of ape about her.

Shoulders hunched, knees jerked forward, one low-hanging hand contorted, she lopes to a halt, gazes at us with swivel-eyed interest. Her chin and lower lip jut out. Her voice sounds husky low notes.

In Red Peter’s lecture to the sinister-sounding Academy, Miss Hunter traces a desperate journey en route to survival. Shot and wounded on the Gold Coast, then on an ocean steamer bent half-double in a triangular cage, Peter realises survival depends on identity change. Having learnt how to spit, smoke a pipe and even consume disgusting rum, the ape runs a rapid course in humanisation that leads him into Variety Entertainment and alienation.

Kafka’s monkey story has been valuably read as black comedy, a prophetic warning about European Jewry’s attempt to assimilate into western culture, with Peter’s cramped cage an eerie foreshadowing of the horrific ghettoes of Prague and Warsaw. It is, too, a ghastly, evocation of the misfit and outsider, forcibly thrust into a new world where he discovers nothing but elemental loneliness.
Until 9 April (020 7922 2922).