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The puppet, a life-sized female chimpanzee, is made out of wood, rope, carved hard foam and paper m芒ch茅. She gazes out at the audience from a raised platform and, through movement alone, weaves her tale. When she was young, she lived as part of a human family. Now she is incarcerated in a research laboratory, deprived of company, her mind slowly deteriorating.

Rowan Magee, Andy Manjuck, and Emma Wiseman operate the chimpanzee, the sole actor in a puppet play running at the Barbican Centre in London. The play, Chimpanzee, by Brooklyn-based actor and puppeteer , is a highlight of 2020鈥檚 . It is a moving story that is attracting attention from neurologists and cognitive scientists along with the usual performing-arts crowd.

Lehane conceived the show after reading Next of Kin, a memoir by psychologist and primate researcher Roger Fouts. Fouts鈥檚 tales of experiments in fostering young chimpanzees in human homes had obvious dramatic potential. Then, as Lehane looked deeper, he discovered a much darker story.

The Fouts family鈥檚 own chimps enjoyed a relatively comfortable life once they outgrew their human home. But other chimpanzees in similar programmes found themselves sold to research labs, living out almost inconceivably solitary lives of confinement and vivisection.

Modern efforts to communicate with chimpanzees began in 1967 at the University of Nevada, Reno, when primatologists Allen and Beatrix Gardner set up a project to teach American Sign Language (ASL) to a chimp called Washoe. These experiments have so transformed our view of chimp culture that many of the original researchers are campaigning to end the practice of keeping primates in captivity. (It is still legal to keep primates as pets in the UK.)

Chimpanzee vocalisations aren鈥檛 under conscious control, but the apes can communicate using body gestures. 鈥淭his happens naturally in the wild,鈥� says Mary Lee Jensvold, who advised Nick Lehane on his play. A former student of Roger Fouts, she too campaigns to end primate captivity. 鈥淎nd because chimps live in communities that are relatively closed and quite aggressive with each other, each community has its own repertoire of gestures. Where there鈥檚 some overlap, there are differences in how the gestures are articulated.鈥�

In other words, each community speaks in its own accent, and this, says Jensvold, 鈥渞eally speaks to chimpanzees being cultural beings鈥�.

As the sign-language studies grew more ambitious, the Gardners and their colleagues Roger and Deborah Fouts took the chimps into their own homes, acculturating them as humans as far they could to encourage communication.

The obvious question 鈥� what is it like growing up in a family that contains chimpanzees? 鈥� is the only question Roger Fouts鈥檚 son Joshua struggles to answer: 鈥淭he reality is it鈥檚 all I knew.鈥� Joshua, now a media scholar, was raised in a family whose rituals involved members that weren鈥檛 human, whose human members would sign to each other so the chimpanzees wouldn鈥檛 feel left out of the conversation, and the experience has left him with a profound sense that every non-human has inherent sapience. 鈥淲hen I鈥檓 walking down the sidewalk, and I see a human walking with their dog,鈥� he says, 鈥淚 tend to greet the dog.鈥�

Roger Fouts and his colleagues found that their animals used ASL to communicate with each other, creating phrases by combining signs to denote novel objects.

Washoe was the first chimpanzee to wield ASL in a convincing fashion. Others followed: when Washoe鈥檚 mate Moja didn鈥檛 know the word for 鈥渢hermos鈥�, he referred to it as a 鈥渕etal cup drink鈥�. When Washoe was shown an image of herself in the mirror, and asked what she was seeing, she replied: 鈥淢e, Washoe.鈥�

The researchers could hardly credit what they were seeing 鈥� and some of their peers still don鈥檛. Jensvold believes there may be a cultural conflict at work. 鈥淚n the US, comparative psychology has historically been a very lab-based science, where you set up these contrived experiments in order to answer your research questions,鈥� she says. 鈥淥ut of Europe comes an ethological approach, which is really more about taking the time to observe.鈥�

The sign language research has drawn Jensvold and her colleagues into animal welfare and protection. 鈥淲e can鈥檛 keep doing to them what we鈥檝e been doing,鈥� she says.

Joshua recalls the moment his father reached the same conclusion: 鈥淎bout midway through his career, Roger realised that this was an experiment that should never have been done. Out of the desire to determine what it is about humans that makes us special, we鈥檝e effectively condemned these chimpanzees to a life of incarceration. They鈥檙e enculturated to our behaviours. They can never be reintroduced to the wild.鈥�

There are no captive chimps in New York, so Nick Lehane鈥檚 research for his play consisted almost entirely of watching videos. According to Jensvold, he couldn鈥檛 have picked a better form of study. 鈥淲ith video tape,鈥� she says, 鈥測ou can take close observation down to a minute level.鈥�

By the time Jensvold got involved in Lehane鈥檚 project, there was already a performance ready for her to judge. For Lehane, that was a heart-in-mouth moment: 鈥淚 was afraid that despite our best efforts, we had missed the mark. If anyone was going to think that we had missed something vital about chimp movement or behaviour, it would be Mary Lee.鈥�

He needn鈥檛 have worried. 鈥�Chimpanzee was phenomenal,鈥� says Jensvold. 鈥淚 was spotting things that I knew other people in the audience, people who weren鈥檛 experts, weren鈥檛 going to notice. He captured these incredible nuances.鈥� She pauses: 鈥淪o the level of suffering that he鈥檚 depicting: he gets that right, too.鈥�

How does Lehane鈥檚 chimpanzee convey emotion, given that chimp and human expressions don鈥檛 overlap at all precisely?

鈥淎 lot of it is in the miming of breath patterns,鈥� says Lehane. 鈥淪hort little pants and hoots look happy; deep intense heaves and cough will register as a different emotion.鈥�

鈥淥ne of the things I think is so cool about puppetry is that the audience fills in so many blanks,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 can鈥檛 tell you the number of times that someone has said, 鈥楬ow did you make the puppet cry?鈥� 鈥楬ow did you make the puppet frown?鈥� 鈥業 loved it when the puppet blinked!鈥� It tickles me because I just didn鈥檛 do any of those things.鈥�

Is there a danger here that the audience is merely anthropomorphising his subject, interpreting his chimpanzee as little more than a funny-shaped human?

In answer, Lehane quotes primatologist Frans de Waal: 鈥淭o endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us.鈥�

runs 21 鈥� 25 January 2020 at聽Barbican Centre, London