By Bill Marx

This moving, at times beautiful, production evokes Michael K’s vision of purity, a rejection of collective cruelty and madness that asserts human dignity’s last stand — as an animal.

Life & Times of Michael K, J.M. Coetzee’s novel of the same name, adapted and directed by Lara Foot in collaboration with Handspring Puppet Company. A Baxter Theatre Centre and Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus production, presented by Arts Emerson at the Robert J. Orchard Stage, 559 Washington Street, Boston, through February 9.

A scene from Life & Times of Michael K. Photo: Richard Termine

One of the rewards of this compelling production of J.M. Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K is that it stimulated me to pick up the novel again, which I read back in 1990, seven years after it had been published. The volume remains a powerful, alarmingly germane fable about dehumanization as the calculated product of structural injustice.

Coetzee’s inarticulate Black protagonist is the harelipped son of a Cape Town cleaning woman. Considered “simple” by many, he grew up in an institution for handicapped children, eventually finding work as a gardener in the city’s Parks and Gardens department. Michael is in his early 30s when the Civil War breaks out at the same time as his mother’s health degenerates. He embarks on a grueling mission to bring her back (in a makeshift pushcart) to the Karoo farm where she remembers having spent an idyllic childhood. The narrative doesn’t focus on South Africa’s military or political violence (this stage version pretty much ignores those angles), but concentrates on the country’s institutional horrors.

Coetzee is not just out to morally condemn corrupt individuals, but to denounce the machinations of a lethal bureaucracy that Michael stubbornly tries to survive, on his own eccentric terms, as he is mugged, punished because he does not have the proper papers, shunted into a work camp, robbed and then jailed by the military. A noncombatant caught between two pitiless opponents, Michael is hungry throughout his journey, partly because he refuses to eat food that he himself has not grown. The system has poisoned everything that is supposed to nourish the body and spirit.

The production’s puppetry is of the high quality you would expect of Handspring, the company behind the marionettes in War Horse. Three puppeteers (Craig Leo, Markus Schabbing, and Carlo Daniels) manipulate the wooden Michael puppet with impressive balletic grace, Daniels supplying Michael’s voice. The manikin is exquisitely detailed, embodying the polarities of the novel’s hardscrabble protagonist: simultaneously fragile and tough, helpless, yet, with the help of a community (the puppeteers), strong. Other puppets include Michael’s mother Anna and three playful-to-the-max kids, but the standout, besides Michael, is an elegantly crafted goat. The staging’s most arresting scene is when Michael tries to drown the animal in a pool of water: the acrobatic swoops and dives, the surprisingly visceral agony and interlaced wrangling, are breathtaking, visually and emotionally. The performers, Andrew Buckland, Sandra Prinsloo, Faniswa Yisa, Billy Langa, and Nolufefe Ntshuntshe, play a number of roles and provide narration as well, chunks of which are taken from Coetzee’s skeletal prose, which is often intended to underline South Africa’s anomie — the performers, understandably, attempt to infuse some enlivening comic energy.

Craig Leo and Carlo Daniels in Life & Times of Michael K. Photo: Fiona McPherson

As wizardly as the production’s puppetry can be, there are weaknesses here, principally stemming from Lara Foot’s somewhat sentimentalized adaptation, which tamps down on Michael K’s unrulier, asocial aspects. Coetzee invites resonances with Kafka (Joseph K in The Trial), but as I reread the novel I was struck at how its self-isolating wanderer fuses Herman Melville’s Bartleby (“I would prefer not to”) with Voltaire’s Candide. Michael K rejects rules wholesale, embraces total seclusion (though at one point he entertains the idea of joining the rebels), and turns his back on condescending but real attempts at altruism. Foot excludes a section of the story where the medical staff tries to feed Michael, who refuses to accept any nourishment.

The genial Michael K we see playing with children in this production does not chime with the story’s creature of resilient indifference, his behavior suggesting a form of autism. This passive protagonist is all refusal after his mother dies — aside from his monomania about living as a gardener and growing things. (Note that Michael does not want to become a farmer, given farming’s tradition of oppression in South Africa.) Also, it is disappointing Foot does not underline the narrative’s ecological warning. At one point, Michael K fears that “the earth would grow hard and forget her children” — a barrenness that inevitably follows the ruin of nonstop warfare, neglect, and dispossession. Video projections on the back wall — often featuring blown-up pictures of Michael K — give viewers opportunities to closely admire Handspring’s craftsmanship, but they also send off vibes of conventional heroism. Add composer Kyle Sheperd’s melancholic score, which is trotted out with mechanical regularity, and you have a domesticated version of Coetzee’s inscrutable hero.

Still, this moving, at times beautiful, production evokes Michael K’s vision of purity, a rejection of collective cruelty and madness that asserts human dignity’s last stand — as an animal:

What a pity that to live in times like these a man must be ready to live like a beast. A man who wants to live cannot live in a house with lights in the window. He must live in a hole and hide by day. A man must live so that he leaves no trace of his living. That is what it has come to.

While Life & Times of Michael K was concerned with the apocalyptic threats of the “revolution” in apartheid South Africa, its vision of devastation remains depressingly relevant to today’s scorched-earth warfare, from Sudan and Afghanistan to Israel in Gaza. Michael K’s determination to nurture the earth stands as a fragile hope in the face of those who want to erase people and nature without leaving a trace.

Bill Marx is the editor-in-chief of The Arts Fuse. For four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast, and online. He has regularly reviewed theater for National Public Radio Station WBUR and The Boston Globe. He created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. In 2007 he created The Arts Fuse, an online magazine dedicated to covering arts and culture in Boston and throughout New England.