BEVERLY HILLS — Alas, it was only a short, five-performance run (Nov. 21-24) in the Bram Goldsmith Theater in this city’s Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, but those who had the good fortune of experiencing Life & Times of Michael K will not soon forget it. A dozen actors from Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre in collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company took us back about forty years into the sorrowful heart of apartheid South Africa with the spellbinding two-hour, intermissionless stage play adapted by Lara Foot based on Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee’s 1983 Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name.
Theatergoers and avid followers of puppetry may recall the company’s previous works War Horse and Little Amal. Life & Times of Michael K has previously been staged in Edinburgh and New York.
“At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival,” wrote Joyce MacMillan in The Scotsman, there is still the occasional show that somehow feels like the year’s main event, the one every Fringe-goer should not miss…. Life & Times of Michael K is one of those shows; a great tale of oppression and the struggle to overcome it.”
Michael K is born to a mother whose entire life has been one of service to wealthier white families. He had the misfortune to be born with a harelip, serious enough that it was hard for him to breastfeed. Though he found his way to take food and drink, his childhood was plagued by the taunting of classmates and neighbors. In time he was sent to a special children’s school where he would not stand out so distinctly. His most fulfilling job was a couple of years spent in Cape Town’s parks and gardens department, where he found his joy until the layoffs came. Although the odd stranger might suggest that an operation to correct his harelip was possible, somehow the opportunity never arose.
A viewer gets the feeling that the harelip itself is a metaphor for all that was so wrong, so spitefully hateful and vicious about the apartheid system in South Africa. This large, amazingly rich country in agricultural, industrial, mineral and human potential could not muster sufficient organizational resources to provide for even this relatively simple surgical correction that would have made Michael’s life one of immeasurably greater possibility and ease. Instead, those resources were entirely dedicated to maintaining racial superiority and white privilege in a cruel system where the majority Black and Colored South Africans had no rights that the white minority had to respect.
As the second Trump administration looms over America, one could ask the same question: Is the maniacal drive to amass profits and protect monopolistic control over the economy so vital to our own ruling class that the aspirations of all but a handful of billionaires and millionaires are deemed merely pesky annoyances to be outlawed?
Michael’s mother Anna K—his father had died long before—would often relate stories about the farm in the town of Prince Albert where she had grown up. (One gets the impression that the initial K is all that society leaves of this family’s African last name.) Now, as she is old and sick, he promises to take her back there to live out her days and eventually be buried in its soil. He jerry-rigs a cart with a big washtub she can sit in as a kind of rickshaw he will push, over the 400 kilometers between Cape Town and Prince Albert. The hauntingly sad but beautiful story follows Michael cross-country, a pilgrim on the road of life through changing weather, scenery and urban settings, with adventures, ill-fated encounters, the robbery of Anna’s life savings, demands for the proper permits, and those few who befriend him along the way. Mother declines rapidly, enters a hospital in Stellenbosch where she is neglected and dies without her son being permitted to say his goodbyes. The next thing he knows, he’s handed a box of her ashes, and it’s for that residue of her life that he vows to continue onward and take it back to the farm.
(I am reminded of a brief conversation I had in South Africa in 2013 with a man on the street. I asked him if such-and-such a place was within walking distance. Laconically, he replied, “Every place is within walking distance if you have the time.”)
One thing Michael learns is that a very real civil war is going on around him. We hear the sounds of planes, gunshots and explosions and see bands of rebels, and of police, roaming throughout the countryside. Mass civil disobedience and acts of revolutionary sabotage of the state’s infrastructure have become commonplace. Within a decade, as we know, the end of apartheid rule would come.
Eventually, Michael finds the farm, but it has been deserted for reasons that go unexplained. Did the children of the white owners not choose to follow in their footsteps in operating it? Did the workers pick up and leave? Did the ravages of civil war come too close to home, too dangerous to continue farming? When he arrives, though, he is able to restore a bit of functionality to the property, getting the windmill to run again, getting it to pump ground water, planting pumpkin seeds for a future crop. Forced to be humble before his white “masters” earlier in life, he shows his grit and inventiveness once he’s on his own. His interactions with a goat that wanders back to the farm is a highlight of the show.
A hungry, tattered stranger shows up, and it turns out he is the grandson of the farm owners, destitute and reliant on Michael for survival. When this man, a deserter from the South African army, starts assuming the old “master” role, as if to put Michael back into a condition of servitude, Michael resumes his peregrination into the soulless high mountains, where he assumes, without food and water, he will die. Well, at least he had fulfilled his life’s purpose—to return his mother to her birthplace.
Life & Times of Michael K is multimedia production, using projections, music, dance, and of course puppetry. Its development took more than two years of planning.
At two-thirds the size of an average adult human, and often held in a position a foot or more off the stage, Michael is operated bunraku-style by a team of three puppeteers. Craig Leo, the show’s puppet master, says, “There’s something strange that happens. You have these moments—where he just comes alive. It’s when the synchronicity really clicks in between the three puppeteers, and then all of a sudden you’re holding him and he becomes incredibly light. And he’s suddenly almost moving on his own.
“He has kind of a tortured look on the one side,” Leo continued. “I don’t know how else to describe it. From the other side, he’s actually very beautiful. He’s a really handsome man; …in the light, his expression changes all the time. It catches all those carved lines in the wood.”
An audience is primed to view a puppet character with empathy. It’s almost as if the deepest emotions we are often too embarrassed to speak aloud transfer onto the puppet, perhaps in a way that would seem too demonstrative with a human actor playing the part. We admit a level of compassion that would seem calculatedly manipulated with a living person in the role.
My favorite moment in the play happens when the starving Michael is offered a chicken pastry pie, and he starts eating. One of his handlers eyes him hungrily over his shoulder, and Michael shares his lunch with him, then also with the second handler on his other side. He becomes more human than perhaps even the humans might have been. A life that had denied him personal dignity does not keep this existentialist Everyman from acknowledging the dignity and needs of others.
The glorious interracial South African cast includes Susan Danford, Andrew Buckland, Faniswa Yisa, Roshina Ratnam, Carlo Daniels, Markus Schabbing, Billy Langa, Marty Kintu and Nolufefe Ntshuntshe, and puppet master Craig Leo. Clearly they are committed to keeping the memory of apartheid alive and not lost to future generations.
The creative team is made up of Lara Foot (adaptor, writer, director), Handspring Puppet Company (adaptors, puppet directors, design and makers), Patrick Curtis (set design) Kyle Shepherd (original music composition), Joshua Cutts (lighting), Fiona McPherson and Barrett de Kock (directors of photography and film), Yoav Dagan (videography and editing), Kirsti Cumming (projection design), Phyllis Midlane (costumes), and Simon Kohler (sound design).
One stands back in admiration and amazement that a doughty artistic collective should have seen Coetzee’s novel as an apt vehicle for puppet theater. I could easily see a film made from this work that would give the play, and the art of puppetry, a wider international appreciation.
A quick search revealed that the play will be staged in Boston, Jan. 31-Feb. 9, 2025. Information is available here. Don’t miss it!
A short preview of the show can be seen here.
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