Max Webster on adapting Life of Pi for the stage: ‘The show asks the audience to imagine along with it’

Telling the story of a shipwrecked boy sharing a lifeboat with a tiger for 227 days, Yann Martel’s Booker-winning novel Life of Pi might sound impossible to bring to life in a theatre. However, according to its director Max Webster, by inviting the audience to engage their imagination his production feels ‘more real than CGI’. Interview by Mark Fisher

There are many good reasons for adapting Life Of Pi. After it was published by Edinburgh’s Canongate, Yann Martel's novel won the 2002 Man Booker Prize and went on to be loved by many millions worldwide. The 2012 screen version by Ang Lee won four Oscars. If popularity was the only criterion, you would not hesitate to put it on the stage.

But there are also good reasons for not adapting Life Of Pi. Consider the story: Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel finds himself lost at sea for 227 days in a lifeboat with only zoo animals for company. One of them is Richard Parker, a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. The magic-realist novel is full of meditations on philosophy and religion.

How could you make 227 days in the Pacific interesting? How could you make a tiger credible – not to mention the hyena, zebra and orangutan? How could you make all that philosophy dramatic?

Yet on its inaugural run at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, Max Webster's production raked in the five-star reviews. The Guardian called it "a triumph of transformative stagecraft." The Telegraph said it was "a worthy successor to War Horse." And the Stage praised it as "a testament to the power of imagination".

From the first dress rehearsal, the audience gasped and rose to their feet. Acclaimed runs in London and New York followed. Now, after the current 12-month UK tour that brings it to Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh, it has its sights set on Europe and Australia.

The magic is in the set by Tim Hatley with a floor that seems as porous as the sea and a raft that can spin as if buffeted by the tides. It is also in the puppets of Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell, large-scale animals that seem to have a life of their own. You are convinced they are breathing.

To bring the enormous – and ferocious – Richard Parker to life takes three puppeteers and they need to be at the peak of physical fitness. The company is touring with its own physiotherapist. “I still go to the gym but I don’t lift as much because I know I’m going to get a work-out during the show,” says Akash Heer, who manipulates the tiger’s head. “My stamina has definitely improved.”

The Life of Pi PIC: Johan Persson

“It’s an athletic piece of physical theatre,” agrees Webster, whose production won five Olivier Awards in the West End and three Tony Awards on Broadway. “It’s demanding, physical and extreme. The extremity of the physical challenges are linked to the excitement of what you’re watching on stage.”

Connected to that excitement is the preposterousness of the undertaking. “I’ve always been interested in putting impossible things on stage," says Webster, who directed The Winter’s Tale at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum in 2017 and recently directed David Tennant in Macbeth in London.

"You can stage anything: climbing a mountain or fighting a tiger in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. That also has a political link to the book: that imagination is possible and you can imagine a better society or a better world.”

In the theatre, the audience becomes part of the game of make-believe. “The show asks the audience to imagine along with it,” he says. "A puppet is not as realistic as CGI but, weirdly, because our imagination is involved, it’s like a hand being stretched out to us and the tiger becomes more real.”

Hiran Abeysekera as Pi in Life of Pi PIC: Johan Persson

Equally fearless was playwright Lolita Chakrabarti. When she was asked to adapt Life Of Pi, she jumped at the chance. “I loved the book and without knowing how, I was like, ‘Yes, please,’” she says. “I like to write a first draft on my own without anyone else creative attached. I didn’t have any idea how amazing the puppets would be or how they would evolve, but in terms of representing animals, I knew puppetry would be the way.”

Even at the very earliest try-out, she had an inkling this was something special. Caldwell and Barnes had brought in a prototype tiger to test on a couple of scenes. “It was literally a foam head on a spine with legs,” says Chakrabarti. “And it was magic even with that prototype puppet that had nothing to it. From that moment, it was a whole new thing.”

Like playing a musical instrument, the puppeteers must follow a tightly choregraphed physical score, making it their own as they master it. To bring a tiger to life, they must focus on every pulse, breath and muscle movement.

“There’s a story for the animals that runs like an undercurrent to the script,” says Caldwell. “We need to know precisely the physics of each moment – this paw hits the face and does this – but also every twitch of its paws, every flick of its tail is communicating some kind of thought or emotion.”

Even after the accolades, they have continued to refine the show. “There’s nothing like praise to make you up your game,” says Chakrabarti. “If someone says it is amazing you say, ‘OK, how can I make it better?’ We’re all pushing the boundaries.”

How does she account for such phenomenal success? ”There’s something about the story that brings people in,” she says. “That’s testament to Yann Martel’s universal truths. He’s talking about survival, loss, struggle, metaphorical shipwreck as well as real shipwreck, what keeps you going in life, faith, people and love. These are things that have affected everybody no matter where you’re from or what you’ve been through.”

Life Of Pi is at His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, from 30 January–3 February, Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 17–22 June and Edinburgh Festival Theatre, 25–29 June.