‘My story is not an interesting one,” Michael K says but the Baxter Theatre, Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus and Handspring Puppet Company have proved him wrong. In their multilayered production, using dance, film, music and exquisite puppetry, they stage a sweeping adaptation of JM Coetzee’s Booker prize-winning novel from 1983, which gives dignity to a humble man. Born with a cleft lip, institutionalised and treated with contempt throughout his life, Michael gets swept up in a dystopian civil war in South Africa as he attempts to bring his ailing mother back to her childhood home on a farm.
Mother and son are puppets, with their puppeteers visible on stage, animating them with fluid grace. At other times, Michael’s face is presented in closeup on film, walking through a majestic mountain landscape, in images strikingly juxtaposed with the live action scenes. Around the puppets, the ensemble cast of nine perform multiple roles and take turns to narrate the story of a man who initially seems defined by what he is not: not a hero, not powerful, someone who simply wants to be left alone but is hounded by both sides in this unspecified, brutal war.
