A LIVING PORTRAIT
Regular patrons of the theatre are accustomed to passively sitting back, letting the story flow off the stage and course through them. Life & Times Of Michael K is not traditional theatre. It’s not really a play. This beautiful and spellbinding stage adaptation of the award-winning 1983 novel by South African-born writer J. M. Coetzee, now on at The Wallis in Beverly Hills through Sunday, is rather like a living portrait.
Paintings tell stories, but they do it in an unconventional manner. There’s no inciting incident, no climax, no resolution. Instead, a painting is a portal into another realm, another life, and we are invited — summoned, even — to step into this world with a hungry mind and a hopeful heart, willing to participate in weaving together a sense of meaning.
Michael K is a portrait of a man born in Cape Town to a poverty-stricken woman. His cleft lip is a condemnation from the moment his life begins. But his mother, a wry force of nature, raises him to be a man of integrity and inextinguishable spirit. Amid a devastating civil war, Michael and his mother set out on a harrowing pilgrimage to her birthplace, Prince Albert.
The sound design by Simon Kohler is exquisite, a haunting complement to the fractured and dilapidated set design (Patrick Curtis), the stark and imposing projections (Yoav Dagan, Kirsti Cumming), and the sentient lighting (Joshua Cutts). The story is periodically underscored by music (Kyle Shepard) that illuminates the heart of Michael K — by turns joyful, foreboding, and despondent.
However, the most stunning feature of this production is by far the puppetry. This piece, produced by Baxter Theatre Centre (Cape Town, South Africa) and Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus Production (Düsseldorf, Germany), is a collaboration between director/adaptor Lara Foot and Handspring Puppet Company. It’s the first international piece to appear at The Wallis since the pandemic, thanks to Director of Programming Coy Middlebrook. The cast consists of six actors (Andrew Buckland, Faniswa Yisa, Carlo Daniels, Susan Danford, Billy Langa, and Nolufefe Ntshuntshe), two puppeteers (Roshina Ratnam and Markus Schabbing), and one puppet master (Craig Leo), though all of them take part in puppeteering.
Never before has a wooden boy seemed more alive. Michael’s introduction is breathtaking. He’s brought out in a shroud, a lifeless huddled mass. And right before your eyes, he is awakened by the humble magic of theatre. Each puppet often has two, three, sometimes four performers manipulating its body, yet the humans become invisible behind these captivating carved figures — a truly masterful and transcendent display of puppetry.
Perhaps the greatest offering from Michael K is an opportunity to glimpse raw humanity. The symbolism is rich and layered. Theatre is a distillation of reality. The roughly hewn Michael — with his diminutive stature, whittled limbs, and hollow rib cage — is a distillation of a person, only the pith and marrow. Michael K asks, What is left when you carve away all the things we think make us who we are, all the things we imagine give us value and purpose? What is left when you strip away someone’s possessions, family, dignity, and dreams? What you have is a dead leaf animated by the wind, a memory of our head in our mother’s lap, a heart-shaped void, and the resilience of the human soul.
Life & Times Of Michael K is not a play. It’s an homage to oral storytelling traditions and a doorway into a culture and an experience beyond our own. It’s a living portrait, poetry on stage. It’s the essence of what it means to be alive.
photos by Richard Termine
Life & Times of Michael K
Handspring Puppet Company and Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre
Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts
Bram Goldsmith Theater, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd. in Beverly Hills
Friday, November 22 at 7:30p
Saturday, November 23 at 2p and 7:30p
Sunday, November 24 at 2p
for tickets (starting at $69), call 310.746.4000 or visit The Wallis
for more info, visit Baxter Theatre and Handspring
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What an engrossing and intriguing review. Thank you
I saw the production at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town and also loved it.