The cast goes ape in a stage adaptation of a Will Self novel

Great Apes by Will Self, adapted by Patrick Marmion, Arcola Theatre, London, to 21 April

IT IS rare that a year goes by without Will Self, that sardonic chronicler of the broken and the bizarre, declaring that the novel is dead, or doomed. His first theatrical venture, Great Apes, is itself a kind of goodbye, though in this case he is waving off the entire human species.

This wildly alternate reality, where the development of Homo sapiens took a different fork in the Darwinian road, is…