What a life, what a time

Good art is one thing, but when your heart and body come into the presence of great art, something uncontainable happens. There is a melding of values which touch what magic is in the world, and why religion exists. This is the kind of theatrical perfection you can expect in The Life and Times of Michael K, directed by Lara Foot, onstage at the Market Theatre.

A great South African classic that won JM Coetzee the Booker Prize for the first time in 1983 and contributed to his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature 20 years later, Michael K takes the universe by its horns. It’s a small book containing a big story that unpicks the meaning of life in such a way that it will move you, seismically. Adapted for stage with great wisdom by Lara Foot, the work is long, but tight. Everything it contains onstage is important.

Created in collaboration with The Handspring Puppet Company, the piece takes the spirit of everyman and magicks his importance in the world. Having seen the play, as you go about the rest of your urban life and you see someone walking on the curb of the freeway, someone sitting alongside a traffic light, late at night, you can no longer not see them. Michael K is everywhere.

With a cast of nine, the performance is so rich in the give and take between language and audiovisual projection, puppetry and choreography, and yet so direct in its approach that your focus is completely on the wooden characters and the unfolding tale. You feel bereft at the curtain call where Michael K, his mother, the goat, the characters he encounters on the way, are not present, because they are not human.

They are puppets. Created in wood with an intricacy that describes muscularity and personality from the inside out, they are built like boats: the wood seems pliable in how it functionally describes the body. When Michael takes off his clothes, he has an exoskeleton, like a beetle, but one that enables his flexibility.

More than one puppeteer gives each puppet life. A gloss on the ancient Japanese Bunraku puppetry tradition, this art form is about a performer empathising with an inanimate object, so deeply that the object gains life. The puppeteers are not dressed in black nor are they made to be invisible. It is the focus that they put into the wooden puppet that gives them invisibility and enables you to fall in love with the puppet itself.

This type of puppetry evokes the 2023 National Theatre Live production of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, with puppetry by Nick Barnes, but collaborative energy by a whole cast, enabling a tiger, a zebra, a goat to radiate life in a way that plays mischievously with one’s sense of what is real.

Take the small, round-bellied goat. It represents a herd of now-wild goats that Michael K encounters on the farm where his mother was born, many days into a difficult sojourn. The goat hunches itself with muscle tension before it leaps and cajoles and scrambles in the mud, bringing a level of physical humour to the work which is not always there in the original text.

Humour in this production skirts on the hems of madness, with throwaway lines about cheeses from Andrew Buckland, self-referential jokes between the puppet and the puppeteers and profanities from Michael’s mum as a very elderly woman. Yet as you watch this work unfold, you find your emotions running wild: you smile to the point of tears at the machinations of small children, as you weep with the great sense of the unfathomable cast out into the world.

Michael K is a Karoo story about a fictitious war. It’s also about the universal freedom of not belonging in a structured society and an understanding of what the body needs and how the soul can replenish itself. And it’s about how the earth gives back though its seeds. Michael is born with a harelip and ostracised because of it. A handful of pumpkin seeds and box of cremated ashes become his yardsticks to being in the world.

Featuring a giant windmill, explosions that are lit offstage and references to the characters as tiny forms travelling in space, the work, with a simple set by Patrick Curtis that enables a cleavage between construction and projection, uses the potency of scale assiduously. And the narrative told is at once tiny and enormous. It’s an unforgettable gem of a work.

The Life and Times of Michael K, is at the Market Theatre until April 13.