An amazing technical achievement: Life of Pi at Wyndham’s Theatre reviewed

Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi is a complicated organism. The action starts in southern India where we meet a precocious teenager, Piscine, who tells his parents that he wants to be known as Pi. The family own a failing zoo and they buy a Bengal tiger to attract fresh customers. The new arrival promptly rips the head off Pi’s pet goat and eats it. Next they take a ship to Canada, with the zoo stowed in the luggage hold, but the vessel hits stormy weather. The beasts break out of their cages and start to eat each other. And when the ship sinks, Pi finds himself on a life raft alongside an orangutan, a zebra with a broken leg, and the Bengal tiger.

These spectacular scenes are tricky enough for a novelist to describe but to put them on stage seems an act of madness. How could a designer create the props and special effects required to make this sprawling and chaotic action work? Well, the miracle happened.