There is a stunning kind of poetry in the puppetry employed to dramatize Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee’s forty-year-old novel about a simple man who makes an epic journey through the physically and morally depleted landscape of South Africa. Like some of the most evocative poetry, the effect of “Life & Times of Michael K” at St. Ann’s Warehouse is often wondrous even when its exact meaning is not always clear.

Michael K is born in Cape Town fatherless and disfigured with a cleft lip. His mother Anna K keeps him away from other children, and he is sent to an institution.  At 15, he becomes  a gardener for the City of Cape Town. When his mother becomes ill, he takes care of her. When her health gets worse, she insists that they return to the rural town of her birth, Michael constructs a cart to take her there on foot.

There is no other way to travel because the country is beset by (a fictional) civil war and by (real but not explicitly mentioned) apartheid: The two are unable to take the train because they would need a permit to travel to that region. 

His mother dies enroute

Michael K’s subsequent journey alternates between episodes of imprisonment and escape; violence by police, soldiers, guerillas and thieves; sometimes, he finds solace in nature, often, he’s laid low by isolation.  His experiences mirror that of the despotism and chaos afflicting the country as a whole. (“How many people are there left who are neither locked up or standing guard at the gate?”)

All of this is told by a well-tuned ensemble of actors and puppeteers from South Africa who take turns as narrator (often using Coetzee’s text verbatim) in collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company – the people who brought us both War Horse and Little Amal. This is enhanced by Kyle Shepherd’s mood-setting music, and by photography, film and video projection, presenting close-ups of Michael’s face, or showing him wandering mountainous terrain.

Michael K. and Anna K. are the main puppets, each one assigned three humans. The puppetry is awe-inspiring. We see Michael fashions a wheelbarrow, an old crate, and an old bicycle into the rickshaw to take his mother back to her rural home, and then we see them in miniature.

He chases a goat into a muddy pond.

At one point, he strips naked – the first puppet I’ve ever seen with a penis. My favorite moment is when, a kindly stranger gives a sandwich to eat. He takes a look at it – perhaps thinking “But I’m a puppet without a mouth that opens; how can I eat this”  – and then comes up with the solution; he gives it one by one to the three puppeteers, who each take a bite out of it.

At two hours without an intermission, “Life & Times of Michael K” feels too long, especially since the narrative is not always clear. The scenes aren’t always crisply differentiated from one another, the episodes can feel repetitive, and it doesn’t help that some of the dialogue is in South African languages other than English, and all of it is in South African accents. (It would help to read the novel, which is short, beforehand.) But some of the uncertainty is deliberate – it’s the point; it’s no coincidence that Michael K.’s experiences suggest Joseph K.’s in Kafka’s “The Trial,” but it’s not just external. ”Always,” one narrator says, “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.”

Luckily, words aren’t what makes “Life & Times of Michael K” worth seeing. It’s the puppets. 

Life & Times of Michael K
St Ann’s Warehouse through December 23, 2023
Running time: Two hours with no intermission
Tickets: $49 – $64
Adapted and directed by Lara Foot in collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company
Puppetry direction by Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones
Original music composed by Kyle Shepherd
Set design by Patrick Curtis, costume design by Phyllis Midlane,  , lighting design by Joshua Cutts, sound design by David Classon,  directors of photography and film Fiona McPherson and Barrett de Koch, projection design by Yoav Dagan and Kirsti Cumming
Cast:  Puppet master Craig Leo with puppeteers Roshina Ratnam and Markus Schabbing and actors Sandra Prinsloo, Andrew Buckland, Wessel Pretorius, Faniswa Yisa, Carlo Daniels, Billy Langa, and Nolufefe Ntshuntshe.
Photos by Richard Termine