A tip for playwrights: when you want to field a formidable character, make sure you give them a good build-up. Do as Lolita Chakrabarti does in her theatrically savvy adaptation of the Yann Martel novel and keep us waiting. By the time Richard Parker, the accidentally named Bengal tiger, slinks on stage, she has primed us to expect something awesome. We already believe in his animal power and carnivorous appetite.
That only makes him more impressive in the puppetry designs of Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell, all War Horse-like breath and sinew, when finally we see him. Lest we doubt his might, his first action is to polish off a goat. When he growls, it shakes the theatre.
The fluidity of the tiger’s movements is characteristic of Max Webster’s consummate production as a whole. It’s in the way Tim Hatley’s set, ravishingly lit by Tim Lutkin with video by Andrzej Goulding, morphs from the speckled greys of a Mexico hospital to the orange glow of an Indian market and the watery desert of a high-seas lifeboat. It is a triumph of transformative stagecraft.
And it is in the superb central performance of Hiran Abeysekera as Pi, the shipwrecked teenager lost in the Pacific with only a tiger and three religions for company. With a weightless grace and precise physicality, the actor has the charm, wit and seriousness to make him a compelling narrator of his own magical-realist tale. In one clever illusion, he evaporates into the set, as if actor and stage have merged into one.
In these assured hands, Martel’s allegory about the possibility of cooperation and the nature of belief becomes a hallucinatory fable, the characters from Pi’s past returning to haunt him during his 227 days at sea, turning a solo voyage into a populous drama of mental survival. If it underplays the novel’s tone of helpless desperation, boredom and privation, it nonetheless does tremendous justice to the author’s imaginative canvas.
“I’ve had a terrible trip,” says Abeysekera at the start. For the rest of us, it’s an extraordinary journey.
• At Crucible, Sheffield, until 20 July.
