Life of Pi production.Evan Zimmerman/Supplied
- Title: Life of Pi
- Written by: Lolita Chakrabarti, adapted from the novel by Yann Martel
- Director: Max Webster
- Actors: Divesh Subaskaran, Fred Davis, Daisy Franks, Akash Heer, Katie Kennedy-Rose, Aizah Khan, Mark Matthews, Kate Rowsell
- Company: Mirvish
- Venue: CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre
- City: Toronto
- Year: To Oct. 6, 2024
The Frank R. Stockton short story The Lady, or the Tiger? – about a seemingly impossible choice – may come to mind as you watch another tiger magnificently roar to life in Life of Pi, Lolita Chakrabarti’s theatrical adaptation of Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning 2001 book, now at the Ed Mirvish Theatre.
Teenager Pi (Divesh Subaskaran), short for Piscine (French for “swimming pool”), aptly finds himself at the mercy of the waters for more than 200 days. A shipwreck on his journey from India to Canada casts him away on a life raft with some of his family’s zoo animals – including Richard Parker, a tiger named via clerical error. His outsized tale of improbable survival and enduring faith confounds an investigator who is desperate to know the truth about the incident. But truth, like the fish that swim beside Pi’s lifeboat, is a slippery thing full of small, sharp bones.
Martel’s tiger tale, an epic story weighted with philosophical metaphor, was surely a daunting prospect to stage, but this Olivier- and Tony-winning production is more than up to the task. Combining stunning design and fluid, evocative puppetry with a streamlined, action-oriented rendering of Martel’s story, director Max Webster creates a sensory delight that succeeds in its new medium by emphasizing its message’s truth in both life and theatre: storytelling helps keep us alive, and a little suspension of disbelief holds great power.
Unlike Martel’s novel, there is no author here teasing out an older Pi’s past; instead, we begin in 1978, directly at the end of the adventure, in a Mexican hospital. In this version, the young man is attended by shipping company rep Mrs. Okamoto (Lilian Tsang) and Canadian embassy official Leela Chen (Bhawna Bhawsar). A classic good-cop, bad-cop team, Chen is compassionate and patient with the troubled teen, while Mrs. Okamoto is strict and no-nonsense, having a plane to catch and a mystery to solve. The similarly sterile white walls of the hospital change in an instant as Pi begins his recollection, warming the space while transporting us to the Pondicherry botanical garden and zoo operated by Pi’s family.
Tim Hatley’s creative jewel box of a set seamlessly opens up to become a market, then the deck of the Tsimtsum cargo ship, later fading into the background to focus on Pi’s claustrophobic lifeboat refuge made of panels that come together or fly apart at any given moment. In a particularly nice touch, Pi’s hospital bed forms the lifeboat’s stern, blurring the line between events as they happen and his recollection of the experience.
The warm tones of Pi’s hometown mimic that of the community Pi remembers: swimming instruction with the robust Mamaji (Chand Martinez), life advice disguised as science from Mrs. Biology Kumar (also Bhawsar), feuds with math genius sibling – in this adaptation, a sister – Rani (Riya Rajeev, appropriately annoying), and attendance at weekly temple, mosque, and church services to the confusion of his parents (a quietly warm Ameet Chana and Goldy Notay). God is everywhere, he muses, and religion is simply choosing the story you like best. Pi chooses them all, and he’ll return often to the subject of the expansiveness of faith and its relationship to storytelling.
Not just a method of instruction, the show’s intricate, finely crafted animal puppets are its chief delight.Evan Zimmerman/Supplied
Political unrest, however, forces Pi’s father to consider emigration to Canada; in the midst of teaching his son a painful lesson to never forget the dangerous nature of the wild beasts they care for, he posits that man is just as unpredictable an animal and even more dangerous.
Not just a method of instruction, the show’s intricate, finely crafted animal puppets are its chief delight. Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell’s designs show every detail of musculature in portraying a goat, hyena, orangutan, zebra, and the superlative beast Richard Parker, who in a sort of mutual taming takes Pi on an emotional journey from hatred to acceptance and even love.
Outside of one deliberately hallucinatory sequence, Caldwell’s direction of the animals’ behaviour feels impressively realistic, wild rather than Disneyfied. You can almost forget puppeteers Fred Davis, Daisy Franks, Akash Heer, Katie Kennedy-Rose, Aizah Khan, Mark Matthews and Kate Rowsell are there, and it’s hard not to instinctively recoil as your hindbrain reacts to the big cat leaping in your direction.
Another fine discovery is Subaskaran, who takes on the mammoth role of Pi in his professional debut with a keen grasp of the character’s wide spectrum of emotions. Pi is a sage-like character in his pronouncements about faith and fear, explaining how one elevates and the other destroys, and how assigning language to the concepts sustains the former and overcomes the latter. In his tiger and mouse game of logic with Okamoto, he elegantly makes the point that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in any person’s philosophy, and that a normal experience to one may seem fantastical to another.
Though he could give some of his larger pronouncements more space to fully land, Subaskaran smartly refuses to let Pi feel too remote, letting us see the scared, needy, sometimes petulant child peeking through.
That’s a good thing, because any story that boldly declares it will make you believe in God runs the risk of becoming heavy-handed, and Life of Pi has its share of obvious, Pi-in-the-sky moments.
The sheer elegance of its animal handling, however, prevents it from ever getting off-puttingly sanctimonious. As a puppeteer simply detaches from a deceased beast’s carcass and exits to the wings, you might swear you saw a flicker of a soul – the lady and the tiger.
In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)