Cape Town’s Handspring Puppet Company, which helped bring to life the magnificent and moving War Horse at Lincoln Center in 2011-13, has alit at St. Ann’s Warehouse with a less epic but equally touching endeavor: Life & Times of Michael K, drawn from Nobel Prize-winner J. M. Coetzee’s 1983 novel. Provenances don’t come any more distinguished, and adaptor/director Lara Foot (whose all-human Mies Julie at St. Ann’s in 2012 was likewise a knockout) has done the work justice.
This is not a family-oriented puppet show, as a birth scene early on makes clear. Having screamed a torrent of obscenities in late labor, Michael K’s mother – a three-quarter-scale puppet with a race-indeterminate, ageless but weathered look – recoils at the sight of her newborn’s cleft palate. A closeup appears on a rear screen: “It looks like a tiny rabbit,” notes a nurse (Sandra Prinsloo, excellent in several non-puppeteering roles). Michael’s mother, unable/unwilling to care for the child while housekeeping for a rich couple, packs him off to an orphanage, where of course he is mercilessly teased. The child puppets – designed, as are all, by Adrian Kohler in concert with the company – are expertly crafted, manipulated, and voiced, without a trace of cutesiness.
Aging out of school, Michael is assigned work as a gardener in Cape Town’s public park system where, simple if not outright slow, he finds wonderment in the skittering of falling leaves. (Cue Kyle Shepherd’s mournful music: the sound track is subtly transporting.) When his mother’s health declines disastrously, Michael risks all to deliver on her dream of returning to the far-away farm where she grew up. We see this plan as impractical – pure fantasy. But having long questioned the purpose of his troubled existence, Michael believes he has at last found the answer: “He had been brought into the world to look after his mother.”
Energized by this novel sense of mission, Michael K comes up against the obduracy and cruelty of the state, in the form of officials, enforcers, and – perversely enough – rebels. Constantly starving and on the run, except for one brief interlude in which the earth reciprocates his loving attention with a viable harvest, Michael never loses heart. Is he a holy fool or merely a simpleton? That question is left to the audience to decide as this dedicated cadre of actor/handlers brings Michael’s story to vivid life.
Like the novel itself, the adaptation doesn’t come furnished with a shapely structure or handy message. Most page-to-stage adaptations simplify. This embodiment of Coetzee’s masterwork leaves the ambiguities of the original intact, affording an experience that’s all the more impactful.
Life & Times of Michael K opened December 4, 2023, at St. Ann’s Warehouse and runs through December 23. Tickets and information: stannswarehouse.org
