The wow factor indeed.
Yann Martel’s inventive 2002 Man Booker Prize-winning modern classic Life of Pi went on to become a four Oscar-winning film and Lolita Chakrabarti’s stage adaption boasts myriad trophies including five Oliviers (one of which celebrated, for the first time, a puppetry team as Best Supporting Actor)—and it is not hard to see why.
Visually stunning with superb puppets and light-scaping, the resilient Pi’s dramatic journeys—from India to Mexico; from questioner to agnostic; from child to philosopher—is cleverly documented on Tim Hatley’s simple set.
Richard Parker, the magnificent Bengal tigeress, dominates Finn Caldwell and Nick Barnes’s puppet menagerie with menace and survival palpable in every prowl and twitch; their hyena is a brutal predator devouring the very guts from an injured zebra; we are reminded that orangutans can break the arm of a man in a single blow while meerkats, giraffe, goat, birds, butterflies, turtle and fish swarm throughout. Glorious... and bloody.
Chakrabarti’s adaption, clearly aimed at a young adult audience, only skims the surface of Martel’s philosophical treatise.
A slightly rushed scene-setting start ensures we know all the salient facts: about animal instinct and who can swim; the unrest in India compelling the family to leave; the religions on offer at temple, church and mosque; the cook’s love of meat (the more raw, the better) and the ship’s track across the Pacific.
With the play midway through a gruelling 30+ venue tour, ‘Pi alternative’ debutant Adwitha Arumgam’s delivery is fresh and compelling. Her teenage meld of thoughtful multifaith enquiry and thoughtless actions, childish ebullience and adult determination, careful planning and foolishness is absolutely believable.
Max Webster’s direction is pacy and musing by turns, while the cast of just a dozen (plus puppeteers) populates the stage with father (East is East’s Ralph Birtwell), mum and sister, aunt, uncle, sailors, priest, imam, dockers, nurse, shipping company investigator and embassy official to list a few.
Hatley’s sparse set transports the action from stark hospital room to vibrant Indian zoo with just a few flaps opening to show verdant trees bathed in warm sunlight and a couple of fences; roll on scaffolding is added for a bustling marketplace and a gantry for the doomed cargo ship.
But mostly, it is just the hospital bed and a couple of slowly rotating metal arcs which return Pi to the tedium and terror of weeks and weeks aboard the lifeboat with less-than-ideal companions.
Manhandled floating debris and multi-award-winning Andrzej Goulding’s impressive projection mapping convince—of the storm, the rain, the never-ending sea.
No substitute for the book, but an absolute lesson in just what can be achieved on stage.