Everything about this production is amazing, extraordinary: the play of lights and colours that suggest a zoo in India; the puppeteers who bring to vivid, visceral (sometimes vicious) life its animals; the projections that turn a backdrop into a ship and a bare stage into an ocean - now calm, now stormy. All of this is achieved in full view of the audience with almost no trickery (Pi’s disappearing dive into the waters is an astonishing exception).
In Lolita Chakrabarti’s brilliantly dramatic adaptation, the staging itself embodies the key question at the heart of Yann Martel’s Booker prize-winning novel: what is believable? Even as we see the illusions created, we accept their reality in the story.
Chakrabarti sets Pi’s experiences as a series of flashbacks told from a hospital room in Mexico, where a teenage boy is recovering after spending months at sea, the only survivor of a shipwreck in which his family, the crew and all the animals in the zoo they were relocating to Canada were drowned. Pi is forced to relive his ordeal by Mr Okamoto (David KS Tse), a company assessor, determined to discover the “facts” of the accident. Pi’s account involves his being alone in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker. Mr Okamoto challenges these “unbelievable… fantastical fictions”. Pi offers another version. “Which story do you prefer?” he asks. As in the novel, the performance connects the question to choices at the core of our existence.
The technical virtuosity of the team realising Pi’s adventures is dazzling and, under Max Webster’s direction, all the acting is superb, but the centre around which the whole revolves is Hiran Abeysekera as Pi. He is, without a word of exaggeration, unbelievably credible.
• Life of Pi is at the Crucible, Sheffield, until 20 July
