In Life & Times of Michael K, a Wooden Puppet Becomes an Everyman

It is a great irony, when over halfway into the play Life & Times of Michael K, the title character says directly to a rapt audience, “The story of my life has not been an interesting one.” For over an hour, we have followed Michael K as he journeys with his mother from their war-torn home in Cape Town, South Africa to her rural birthplace in Prince Albert. We have watched the ridicule experienced by a young Michael when other children mocked him, calling him “rabbit face” because of his cleft lip—and then that same cruelty extended into his adulthood. His life is filled with adversarial forces, from government officials to white landowners to even the harsh landscapes he travels. It’s a captivating story, a far cry from uninteresting.

But what makes this production, now running at St. Ann’s Warehouse through December 23, so mesmerizing to watch, is that Michael K is a puppet. Co-produced by University of Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre Center and Germany’s Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, the play is adapted and directed by Lara Foot, in collaboration with South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company. It is based on J. M. Coetzee’s 1983 Booker Prize-winning novel. Handspring is perhaps best known for their design and puppetry work on the Olivier- and Tony-winning stage adaptation of War Horse. Michael K previously played at the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where it received several invitations to perform the show internationally (Playbill previous called it "the kind of production that will haunt you for a long, long time” as part of our Fringe coverage).

When approached by the Theater der Welt festival with a new play commission, Foot knew she wanted to adapt a novel, simply because she enjoys that process. Her friend suggested she look at Life & Times of Michael K. Foot had read it, but she revisited the work with staging in mind. “I just started seeing this as a production—as this journey, this odyssey of a very simple but prophetic kind of man,” Foot says.

Foot turned immediately to Handspring. She’d wanted to work with them for years, but timing and finances had caused previous projects to fall away. However, this production already had a budget coming with it and, as it turned out, Life & Times of Michael K happened to be a favorite book of Handspring co-founder Adrian Kohler.

Both Michael K and his mother are puppets, each controlled by three puppeteers at once, with one of each trio voicing the character. The children in the story are also puppets. A few birds on wire and one goat complete the puppet cast, with the rest of the human characters in the story portrayed by actors who interact with the puppets.

Michael K and his mother are a slightly less than full-size, standing about four feet tall. The heads of the puppets are carved from jelutong, a low-density wood native to Southeast Asia. A lightweight laminated carbon fiber is used in the construction of the legs, chest, and pelvis. The ribcage area, visible when Michael removes his shirt, is hollow and skeletal, made from cane. The eyes are black, faceted, glass beads known as “Portuguese mourning beads."

Craig Leo and Carlo Daniels in *Life & Times of Michael K* Richard Termine

Foot says that she never would have done this show with only actors, that puppets were an optimal vehicle for the story. “It just feels like this character is a container of all of our emotions and attachments,” says the director. “To imbue this beautiful object with three different personalities [in the three puppeteers], and then to hold the philosophy of Coetzee…it just felt like a poetic piece as opposed to a drama as such.”

Foot talks about the layers in Coetzee’s writing, how the further one reads, the more the story opens up. She’s mirrored that layering with the staging through storytelling, puppetry, and even film.

While Michael K’s trek is a physical one from Cape Town to Prince Albert and back again, it is also, of course, a spiritual journey. A quest for purpose, a longing to belong somewhere. At one point, he retreats to the mountains alone. Foot herself visited the Swartberg mountains many times during the writing process for inspiration. She also found that Michael’s time in the mountains most strongly demonstrated his connection to nature, which he ultimately settles on as the meaning of his life. He is a gardener; he tends the earth.

Foot wanted to give that landscape a voice in the show, which fell in line perfectly with her vision to film the puppet on his journey. The filmed parts are projected on the back wall of the set. In these moments, Michael K is seen moving through the world without his puppeteers—escaping the rubble of war with his mother in a wagon, walking along a desolate railway, and huddled in a cave on the face of the mountain. Not only do these moments illustrate his world, but prove to be a practical decision as well, making the show more accessible for larger venues by showing the puppets closeup.

Carlo Daniels, Markus Schabbing, and Andrew Buckland in *Life & Times of Michael K* Richard Termine

There are several moments in the play when the puppeteers function as characters. When Michael K is hungry and given a hand pie, he shares it with his puppeteers. When Michael K is too weak to walk, he is cradled by a puppeteer. When Michael K is physically threatened by a soldier, he is not only supported by his three puppeteers, but the other puppeteers on stage move behind him in solidarity. “I love the whole group ensemble—how they relate to Michael, how they breathe for him. How they wish for him!” says Foot.

Because of his cleft lip, because of his poverty, and perhaps even because of the color of his skin, Michael is an outcast. In a bit of narration (a device used throughout the script), one of the actors tells the audience, “Always when he tried to explain himself to himself, there remained a gap, a hole, a darkness before which his understanding bulked, into which it was useless to pour words. The words were eaten up, the gap remained. His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong.”

That sentiment, of emptiness and profound loneliness, is at odds with the staging of Michael K’s life—in the most beautiful way. There is never a moment on stage when Michael K is alone; there are always three puppeteers holding him up. While visually, the audience sees three human puppeteers, Foot considers them facets of Michael’s psyche. “Literally, there’s no one there for Michael, right? But I think he does hold himself, whether it’s through the memory of his mother, or his gentleness with certain people that he meets, or his absolute respect for nature. Those are elements of his own strength,” says Foot.

So, in this everyman fable, one learns that in times of greatest hardship and despair, one might not be alone after all. Perhaps lean back a little and feel a hand on your back. Foot allegorizes: “There are spirits of your own being that are holding you.”

For tickets of more information, visit StAnnsWarehouse.org.