The Wyndham’s has been given a makeover: the stage built up and out, with the seating in the stalls raised correspondingly. This is, though, a consummate family show (“parental guidance”, they’re saying I’d suggest 10 and up). The fable asks big questions about how we can prove our version of events, the value of storytelling and our capacity to believe extraordinary things because we sense the world is strange beyond measure. There’s a philosophical thread to what unfolds. “My story will make you believe in God” says Hiran Abeysekera’s Pi, recovering from the trauma in a Mexico hospital and getting quizzed by a Japanese insurance man and Canadian embassy official. Richard Parker, by contrast, who sounds like an accountant but is in fact a Bengal tiger, has the primary capacity to rip you to shreds and eat you for breakfast.Īnd that’s a fate which the hero of the tale, an Indian youth who opted for the name Pi, claims to have avoided while drifting in a boat with the beast for more than seven months in the Pacific following a shipwreck.

Joey, the equine darling of the Morpurgo story, had the ability to break your heart as he stamped and reared in distress amid the horrors of the Trenches. That’s on account of its dynamic theatricality and the pivotal place in the story given to a large, visibly puppeteered animal – in fact the puppet director here, Finn Caldwell, had a hand in devising, and appeared in, War Horse. And now, as if to rub salt into the wounds, into the West End bounds Lolita Chakrabarti’s hugely enjoyable stage-adaptation, first seen in Sheffield in 2019, and which I hailed as the successor to War Horse - the National production based on Michael Morpurgo’s novel. Not only has the novel sold over 10 million copies worldwide, but it was made into a successful Oscar-winning film by Ang Lee in 2012. Whoever they are, one feels for them even more with the hindsight of almost 20 years. I understand how they must be feeling today.” That was the line Yann Martel’s agent gave a journalist after the Canadian author won the Man Booker Prize in 2002 for Life of Pi, a novel rejected by at least five London publishing houses before it found a home. “It is embarrassing for the editors concerned.

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