A beautiful synchrony of lighting, music, video and set marked my experience at the theatrical feast, 'Life of Pi', which is now playing at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre in Mumbai. Based on Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi, about a zoo manager’s son, Piscine Molitor ‘Pi’ Patel, who gets stranded on a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan and a tiger, the inventive play brings to life aspects of human ingenuity and animal grace, by beautifully blending reality and fantasy. The Olivier award-winning stage adaptation of Life of Pi, is directed by Max Webster and produced by Simon Friend, and has been brought to life by Lolita Chakrabarti, an Indo-British playwright. Chakrabarti recently spoke to THE WEEK about the challenges of adapting a philosophical book for the stage and recreating the sense of wonder that has become endangered in today’s fast-paced world. She describes the play as a “theatrical feast that even brings alive the Pacific Ocean onstage”.
ALSO READ: 'At the centre of Life of Pi is the story of a boy looking for truth': Playwright Lolita Chakrabarti
Based on a young boy’s fraught survival after a disaster, the play begins in Mexico of the late 70s. The narrative follows a flashback mode with Pi, housed inside a hospital room, recalling the disastrous tragedy that struck his family when a Japanese cargo ship en route to Canada sank. Among its passengers were Pi and his family who had set out from Pondicherry. The family was travelling with animals tended to, by Pi’s zookeeper father; all of who drowned, except for the enormous and lithe Richard Parker, the lion, who kept a traumatised Pi, company for 227 days at sea.
Over a period of a little over two hours of live performance, as Pi spins stories of what happened to him at sea, for the benefit of officials from the Japanese Ministry of Transport and the Canadian Embassy, one experiences the magnetic pull of various elements of incredible stagecraft coming together. I was moved to see how seamlessly the room turned into a boat and then again, the former gave way to the latter and how beautifully the waves appear and the thunderous storm makes you feel as if you are part of it; you feel it, you unwittingly respond to it with an involuntary squint of the eyes and aahs, especially when the schools of fish surface and the stars begin to flicker in the night sky, right in the middle of the ocean. It is a participative experience; one in which you find yourself immersed and, at the same time, one in which you must detach from, after two and a half hours, reluctantly. There are moments of emotional upheaval, especially one when a broken Pi tells the royal carnivore mid journey, “You’re the only reason I’m alive. It’s just you and me.”
I read the book in 2002, when I was still a student, and the impression it had on me was one of resilience and belief in human ingenuity. The story stayed with me long after I had read it. Today, after so many years when I watch the story come alive on stage, my belief in the power of human enterprise has only become more pronounced.
