Life of pi, review: animal magic abounds in this theatrical extravaganza

Dominic Cavendish Theatre Critic 03 December 2021 5:00am GMT “It is embarrassing for the editors concerned. I understand how they must be feeling today.” That was the line Yann Martel’s

agent gave a journalist after the Canadian author won the Man Booker Prize in 2002 for Life of Pi, a novel rejected by at least five London publishing houses before it found a home.  

Whoever they are, one feels for them even more with the hindsight of almost 20 years. Not only has the novel sold over 10 million copies worldwide, but it was made into a successful

Oscar-winning film by Ang Lee in 2012. And now, as if to rub salt into the wounds, into the West End bounds Lolita Chakrabarti’s hugely enjoyable stage-adaptation, first seen in Sheffield in

2019, and which I hailed as the successor to War Horse - the National production based on Michael Morpurgo’s novel. That’s on account of its dynamic theatricality and the pivotal place in

the story given to a large, visibly puppeteered animal – in fact the puppet director here, Finn Caldwell, had a hand in devising, and appeared in, War Horse. Joey, the equine darling of the

Morpurgo story, had the ability to break your heart as he stamped and reared in distress amid the horrors of the Trenches. Richard Parker, by contrast, who sounds like an accountant but is

in fact a Bengal tiger, has the primary capacity to rip you to shreds and eat you for breakfast. And that’s a fate which the hero of the tale, an Indian youth who opted for the name Pi,

claims to have avoided while drifting in a boat with the beast for more than seven months in the Pacific following a shipwreck. Far-fetched stuff. Knowingly so. “My story will make you

believe in God” says Hiran Abeysekera’s Pi, recovering from the trauma in a Mexico hospital and getting quizzed by a Japanese insurance man and Canadian embassy official. There’s a

philosophical thread to what unfolds. The fable asks big questions about how we can prove our version of events, the value of storytelling and our capacity to believe extraordinary things

because we sense the world is strange beyond measure. This is, though, a consummate family show (“parental guidance”, they’re saying; I’d suggest 10 and up). The Wyndham’s has been given a

makeover: the stage built up and out, with the seating in the stalls raised correspondingly. I can’t vouch for the experience at that level but what I can confirm having been treated to good

seats in the royal circle is that from on high it’s still astounding. Directed by Max Webster, the action shifts, in a sublimely fluid fashion, between Pi’s hospital and his odyssey of

peril which shades into surreal, inter-species friendship. There is also superb state of the art projection; video designer Andrzej Goulding achieves a cinematic feast of oceanic tumult, as

well as suggesting starry night skies. At one point Abeysekera’s lithe, likeable Pi jumps overboard, to be swallowed by the briny; it rightly draws gasps from the audience. The puppeteers

achieve animal magic. Whether it’s a giraffe, orangutan, hyena or (fatally mauled) goat in the Pondicherry zoo scenes, or shoals of leaping, luminous fish and a turtle once the action shifts

to the Pacific, each creature is lovingly brought to ‘animated’ life. The star of the show, of course, needing three tireless handlers, is Richard Parker. Exuding a watchful malevolence and

innate magnificence, he moves from brute prowling threat to personality in his own right. He’s the tiger who went to sea you’ll want to go see. Keeping your distance, naturally.

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