It’s not often as adults that we succeed in completely suspending all disbelief. Even when we step inside a theatre where we expect stories to unfold, we still enter with an air of detachment because we’re seated in our own reality.
But, from the very first opening moments, this, the first UK touring production of Life of Pi,well and truly tipped me out of my cynical lifeboat and immersed me in a magical sea.
The story begins with Piscine 'Pi' Patel (Divesh Subaskaran), an Indian boy growing up as the son of a zoo manager in Pondicherry, India in the 1970s.
Tensions in the country lead his family to seek a new life in Canada, boarding a cargo ship only for it to be shipwrecked and leaving Pi as the ‘only’ human survivor. He finds himself stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean for 227 days with his companions—four wild animals: an orangutan, a zebra, a hyena and, most notably, Richard Parker, a Bengal tiger— played by ethereal yet somehow entirely lifelike puppets.
You might wonder how a story of a boy, a boat and a tiger could possibly meaningfully fill a stage and a story—but it is in the recounting of his adventure (and ultimately his trauma) combined with the visual effects that makes Life of Pi so magical. The use of prop details, lighting and colour is ingenious, and you can’t help but be drawn in and forget the outside world for a little while.
Whether allegorical or not, as that's very much open to our interpretation, the story explores themes of survival, faith and the relativity of truth as our central character grapples with questions about the nature of reality and how it is perceived and told.
The tour continues on to Glasgow, Edinburgh and finally Salford.