‘Life of Pi’ is the kind of production that will make you believe in theatre

“I have a story that will make you believe in God.”

This instantly recognisable line, one of the most famous in modern book publishing, is what sets off the story of Life of Pi, Yann Martel’s Man Booker-winning 2001 novel. More than 20 years later, while watching the multiple Tony and Olivier award-winning stage adaptation of the beloved novel, that has just opened at Mumbai’s Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, I think to myself: here is a play that will also make you believe—in storytelling, stagecraft, magic, and your own imagination.

First, the basics. The plot follows Piscine Molitor (Pi) Patel, a teenage boy in the 1970s who is moving with his family from Pondicherry, where his father owns a zoo, to Canada. A storm strikes and their ship sinks, leaving Pi as the sole human survivor. His 227-day ordeal of being marooned at sea with an adult Bengal tiger forms the rest of the plot. But not the story. Because while Pi’s specific circumstances are unique, his story is universal. As playwright Lolita Chakrabarti, who adapted the book for the stage, says, “It’s about survival and applies equally to someone who’s two years old and someone who’s 102. Because no matter what your circumstance in life, everybody has struggled. Everybody has almost failed and then come through. If you’re a toddler who’s frustrated by something, you felt that extreme sense of loss and want and change. And if you’re 102, goodness me, how much change have you been through? For me, this story is about taking that universal element of life and heading towards some kind of enlightenment, because struggle means you pass through a barrier and get somewhere that is different, and hopefully you’ve learned. And Pi is an absolute example of someone who learns from unbelievable loss.”

It is a tale of faith: Pi’s faith in himself and the universe, and ours in the tale he tells us. In the book, Martel has us questioning the narrative from the beginning, when he puts himself in the story and makes it read like non-fiction, to the end, when Pi has to explain his ordeal to disbelieving government officials. He gives them two versions: one with animals and one without, and leaves it to them (and us) to decide what version to believe.

It is also a tale of faiths, plural, given Pi’s fascination with different religions, or, as he’d say, different ways to love god. He’s simultaneously a practising Hindu, Christian, and Muslim, a fact that baffles his family, although they are open-minded enough to let him be. And it is about his ruminations on life, loss, god, and human nature.

None of this is easy to show on stage. In fact, when filmmaker Ang Lee decided to adapt the book for the big screen, many people said it was impossible, that this book was unfilmable. The Oscar-winning movie, though, still managed to retain the meditative stillness and solitude of the book. On stage, however, there is little quietude. Some performances offer over-the-top theatricality, notably Goldy Notay and Ameet Chana who play Pi’s parents. Was the sacrificing of silence a difficult choice for the playwright? “No, because quiet and thoughtful on stage, unless it’s full of intention, is boring. Theatre has to be about what, how, why, what happens next? It has to be about solving a problem, a conflict, until you get to the end, otherwise we’ll be asleep,” says Chakrabarti. “The book doesn’t have dramatic thrust because it doesn’t need to. It’s a personal journey of the reader and the novel. But on stage, I need to take you by the hand and say, how do we survive? Do we survive? Yes we do, but my god have we changed! And I don’t want your feet to land, really. I want you to go, Oh gosh, what is this? And then it ends, and you’ve had a meal, a feast of an evening.”

And it is certainly a feast. Right from the first visual of the zoo in Pondicherry, home to zebras, orangutans, hyenas, rhinos, and of course, tigers, to Pi’s desolation at sea, it is impossible not to feel awed. The set, lighting, and video design are excellent, and Divesh Subaskaran as Pi is outstanding. It is hard to believe this play marks his professional debut.

Leigh Toney, the show’s international director, says of Subaskaran, “He’s really playful and he did come to us fresh out of training, but still had that sense of maturity that is needed for this story. It’s hard for young people to find those emotions of what it is to have lost your whole family and go on that horrific journey. But he found an inner core that helped him root his performance. So even though he is playful and idealistic and all that we know Pi to be at the beginning of the story, he’s also able be reflective and serious and carry the weight of Pi’s struggle.”

His is also a physically exhausting role, given Pi is on stage pretty much the entire length of the show. Which is why there are substitutes for his and some other key roles. While this is not new in theatre, what did make history when the play opened on the West End in London was that there was a female substitute for a male lead role. Chakrabarti explains, “For the actor playing Pi, it’s almost impossible to do eight shows a week, because it’s physically, emotionally, very demanding. So we have one Pi who does six shows a week, and an alternate who comes on for the rest. And then we have covers for both. During Covid, both our male Pis were ill, and our cover was female, so she had to go on. And we had this whole question of whether she should play Pi as a girl or a boy, and I said let’s play her as a girl.” But while the initial decision to cast a woman stemmed more from circumstance than intent, Chakrabarti’s adaptation does enable more female presence on stage. So book Pi has an older brother, but stage Pi has an older sister. And while Mamaji is a major character in both, the play also includes an aunt, who doubles up as the science teacher (a man in the book). “I made more female characters because I want to see more women in the world.”

The real stars, of course, are the puppets. Especially Richard Parker. From his first roar to the oddly comical conversation he has with Pi about food to the way he lopes off into the Mexican jungle without so much as a backward glance, leaving Pi heartbroken, the tiger steals the show. Designers Finn Caldwell and Nick Barnes’ puppetry is incredibly detailed, and one can see the amount of research that the team did on things like the different ways an animal moves, its muscles and weight shifts, how it sits and stands. It takes a while to get used to the fact that the puppeteers are on stage, visibly handling the puppets, and sometimes, the stage does feel crowded, especially in scenes that are meant to show Pi’s loneliness. “We don’t try to hide the puppeteers and make them wear black or anything. We use techniques to help the audience stop looking at the puppeteers and start believing in the tigers,” says Romina Hytten, who joined the production as a puppeteer and is now resident director. She adds that the puppeteers are all also acting, voicing the animals, and using breath and focus techniques to make them come to life. “Initially, you’ll look at the humans, but through the show, they’ll sort of...disappear. A puppeteer’s focus is always the puppet, they don’t look elsewhere. So the audience also gets trained instinctively to look at what they’re looking at.”

And that, perhaps, is why this play is such a special experience. Because it does ask us to use our imagination. And to believe.

Life of Pi is on at the NMACC until December 22, 2024. For tickets, see here