Pi’s puppet tiger earns his stripes
Life Of Pi (Crucible, Sheffield) Verdict: Tiger burns bright ★★★★✩ MOTION sickness is tricky to pull off in theatre, but then again so is casting a full-size Royal Bengal tiger. And there’s still the question here of a lifeboat adrift for almost a year in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
But Max Webster’s remarkable staging of Yann Martel’s bestseller about an Indian boy called Pi shipwrecked en route to Canada is equal to all that.
Lolita Chakrabarti’s deft adaptation emulates the surreal charms of the book and the film. She tells the story from the point of view of the Mexican hospital, where our hero washes up.
The dramatic limitations of a man and a tiger eyeballing each other at sea are overcome by having Pi’s relatives summoned in his imagination. A boy of about nine became a little green around the gills and bailed out before the interval on Tuesday.
I think he was alarmed by Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell’s life-size puppet-tiger devouring a papier-mache goat. And who can blame him?
The standard of puppetry is War Horse level. Look closely and you’ll see the tiger’s diaphragm lift and fall and its rear leg twitch as it snuffles, moans and roars. With other puppeteers on all fours operating an orangutan, zebra, hyena and interloping rat, this is exceptional, back-breaking work.
No less impressive is Tim Hatley’s set that is transformed from featureless white hospital to deep blue sea thanks to projections of waves that crash across the floor and flood it with fish teeming below.
And swirling around Pi’s revolving lifeboat that rises out of the stage, you even get a sense of the Pacific’s heave and swell.
Webster proved himself adept at directing special effects in the Old Vic’s The Lorax last year, but Hiran Abeysekera is also a perfect Pi. His innocence and faith in himself and others radiates across the stage and brings the elements together.
There are sticky moments and I don’t like the way Martel backtracks on his story in the end, but this should be remembered for the theatrical magic of the tiger who came to sea.