Life & Times of Michael K: A magical staging of JM Coetzee’s sweeping, epic tale

Life & Times of Michael K

Black Box Theatre, Galway

★★★★☆

In this sweeping, epic tale, a large-scale staging of JM Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning 1983 novel, the two central characters are played by puppets; the multitudes of others are played by people. Maybe it shouldn’t work. No matter how incredible the puppet-making, no matter how skilled the operators – and it is, and they are, in spades – what effect does it have on empathy when the protagonist’s face, though human and vulnerable and with eyes that seem to glisten with life, is unmoving?

The eponymous Michael K is a simple, humble man whose life has been framed by disadvantage. Born with a cleft lip to a domestic servant in South Africa, he is powerless and impoverished, mocked and belittled. The story follows their journey as he seeks to push his sparky but failing mother, in a makeshift trolley, home across their war-torn country, to the farm of her youth. After a series of calamities she dies, but he continues his pilgrimage to her birthplace and beyond, hurtled through a series of upheavals and vicissitudes.

This coproduction by Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre Centre and Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, in collaboration with Handspring, the puppetry company best known for creating the beast in War Horse and the refugee girl Little Amal, is adapted and directed by Lara Foot, the Baxter’s artistic director, who skilfully marries individual odyssey and tumultuous backdrop.

The structure, mobility and facial subtlety of Handspring’s amazingly crafted puppets of Michael and his mother are outstanding, but the nuances of characterisation are down to Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones’s puppetry direction and to the puppeteers’ skill. Three people work each puppet – one the feet, plus one on each side, for head, arms and hands. All of this is visible. It’s not that you cease to notice these mechanics but that they are integral to the performance. Even as Michael moves and speaks we are conscious of the voice and facial expression of the puppeteer animating him, injecting humanity and empathy.

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The nine multitasking performers manage and animate the puppet characters – three dotey children, and a rampaging goat, as well as mother and son – and glide in and out of the multiple other human characters, and in and out of narration. There is far more narration of action and events and emotion than should work in such a fast-moving and dramatic story. But it does.

The journey son and mother go on is a search for meaning in a cruel, bleak world, the mother for her roots, the son for his destiny, first to return his mother home and, later, to find his own redemption.

This is magic realism, and magical staging.

Continues at Black Box Theatre, as part of Galway International Arts Festival, until Sunday, July 30th