Chimp

Conor Lynch imitates or impersonates a chimpanzee just about perfectly.  Just about.  Dressed in a black singlet, black shorts and black shoes with separate toes, he represents a chimpanzee that we come to know and like and interact with over the course of an hour. 

He doesn’t become a chimpanzee in every behavioural detail because that would be a distraction from what his curious show has to say.  We’d just sit there admiring that and the show would last maybe ten minutes.  What we see is a human being very skilfully pretending to be a monkey and our awareness of that provides the slight distance that keeps us aware of the nature of the monkey’s aspirations.

We find this chimp looking out at us from behind the bars of his cage – a little baleful because we’re free, but mostly curious.  He inveigles a woman in the audience into unlocking the cage – and the show takes off.

Once out of the cage, Chimp lopes about, picking nits out of his hair and audience members’ hair – and eating them - mischievously locking the theatre door, getting us to toss a junior size football back and forth...  Lynch is big, and his fun stuff is funny and endearing, but also can be a bit overbearing and teasing and a bit scary. 

The result no doubt of much close observation – and some fine tuning from director Paul Bourke – Lynch’s chimp has a chimp’s noises – cries, grunts and roars – a chimp’s curiosity, a chimp’s grooming and courting rituals, a chimp’s anger and aggression, and, most finely observed of all, a chimp’s sense of humour and fun.

But these fun human things are not enough.  Clearly Chimp wants more.  Chimp has another trait: he wants to be a human, to do human things and partake of human pleasures. 

He finds a sports coat and fumbles around with it and of course eventually gets it on.  What’s interesting about these developments, is that each time Chimp achieves some semblance of ‘human’ behaviour, we make approving noises which indicates how much we humans are prepared to invest in Chimp really being a chimp and achieving human stuff. 

But there’s a banana in the pocket of the sports coat and Lynch skilfully makes that banana represent the simian, jungle world as opposed to the human world of picnics, wine and sandwiches and – possibly – romance. 

Does Lynch inveigle women from the audience to cooperate, to play along and become part of the show, or are they plants?  Is it a coincidence that one woman happens to have a bunch of bananas?  Four different women interact directly with Chimp in the course of the show.  How do they know what to do?  They’d have to be different women each show, but either they’re forewarned plants, or Lynch picks them with unerring intuitive judgement.    Anyway...

The pull of that banana is strong, irresistible.  A lighting change plunges Chimp into the dim light of the jungle and the sound of jungle drums.  Who – or what – will win?  It’s a painful but very funny struggle.

Lynch, a fine physical comedian, leads us into a trap where we want Chimp to be human as much as Chimp himself wants to be human.  What’s that say about us?  Chimp gently poses that question and we have a lot of fun thinking about it.

Michael Brindley