Edinburgh Festival Theatre – until 29 June 2024
REVIEWED BY RACHEL FARRIER
4****
Aptly, for a story about being lost at sea, Lolita Chakrabarti’s adaptation of Yann Martell’s Life of Pi arrives at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre on a wave of expectation. Martell novel won the Booker Prize in 2002 and was filmed by Ang Lee in 2012. More than ten million people have read the story of Pi, a young Indian boy whose parents own a zoo and who endures the terrors of India’s 1970s Emergency and shipwreck with only a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan, and a Bengal tiger for company.
Unlike most of the rest of the audience, however, I came to Chakrabarti’s adaptation fresh, having neither seen the film nor read the book. This perhaps left me at a slight disadvantage, as some of the play’s impact seems to depend on a prior understanding of the story’s spiritual and philosophical undercurrents. Yet even for the uninitiated there is much to relish in this vibrant and often astonishing production.
Sonya Venugopal made for an exuberant, vivacious lead, very compelling in conveying Pi’s various highs and lows and the subtle way his relationship with the tiger, Richard Parker, evolves from wariness to acceptance. The staging evocatively suggests both the colour and energy of India (I loved the opening scenes of family life in the zoo) and the emptiness of Pi’s time abandoned on the ocean. But the most spectacular element of the whole production are Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell’s beautiful puppets, which move with a convincing animal grace. The athleticism of the puppeteers was remarkable. I especially loved the turtles and fish, as well, of course, as the majestic Richard Parker.
If I had one complaint, it was that the very obvious presence of the puppeteers manipulating some animals could be distracting. Overall, though, this only slightly diminished the effect of a truly magical spectacle.