A boy, a tiger, no CGI: how ‘Life of Pi’ was adapted o the stage

Yann Martel enjoyed Ang Lee’s film of his novel “Life of Pi.” But frankly he prefers the stage version, which comes to town Tuesday as part of an international tour.
“I was more transported by the play than I was by the movie,” admitted the author, from a cottage in Saskatchewan, his hometown province for more than two decades.
“The problem with cinema now is, because of technology you can create anything. The bar is so high that audiences have become inured to special effects. The theatre version lets you participate and almost co-create it. It uses simple means that produce an experience that is quite marvellous.”
Martel’s Man Booker Prize-winning 2001 bestseller uses a slyly suggestive, nested narrative to tell the story of Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel, an Indian teenager who’s stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.
For playwright Lolita Chakrabarti, who adapted Martel’s book and wrote the award-winning “Red Velvet,” which was mounted here by Crow’s Theatre in 2022, the outline of the story is pretty simple.
“Boy who’s happy with his family, gets shipwrecked, loses his family and survives on a boat for 227 days and lives to tell the tale,” she said, on a Zoom call from London, England.
“You need to create the drama and the stakes. What do you get from finding water or food? What do you get from having no company? And how do you achieve all that when there’s nobody with you but a deadly tiger? Those were the sorts of questions that had to be answered.”
Oh, about that tiger. While in the film version, Richard Parker roars to life with CGI and green screen magic, in the play the creators decided early on to use puppets. This, explained director Max Webster (no relation to the 1970s Canadian rock band), worried a lot of people.
“I’d done a production of ‘Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax,’ which also travelled to Toronto, and I knew puppets were a good way of creating fantasy characters who also had some meaning in them,” said Webster, on a separate Zoom call from London.
“So, before workshops began, we had to do a proof of concept workshop in which creators Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell (both involved in the groundbreaking stage show ‘War Horse’) built a prototype and compared that to actors wearing ‘onesie’ animal suits. Whenever producers complained about the puppets being too expensive or complicated, I texted them photos of actors in tiger onesies and they calmed down.”
The decision paid off. The puppets have garnered so much praise that the actors playing them in the show collectively won a 2022 Olivier Award for best actor in a supporting role.
Another challenge Chakrabarti had to solve was what to do with Martel’s novelistic discussions about religion and philosophy.
“I loved those elements in the book,” she said. “Yann looks at three religions — Christianity, Judaism and Islam — and sort of gently laughs not at them but with them. He points out the quirkiness of them and the fact that in many ways they’re saying the same thing.
“But when you put religion onstage it can become heavy and boring. The same with philosophy. You need to be careful in a play that you’re not giving the audience fridge-magnet quotes about gratitude. Everything has to be about story and character. How will this boy alone at sea survive? That is a universal quest for all of us, whether we’re a student labouring over an essay or a two-year-old trying to reach an apple on a table.”
Early on in the adaptation process, producers invited Martel to a workshop. And subsequently, Chakrabarti shared drafts of her scripts with him.
“I gave a few opinions, but they were minor things,” said the novelist. “The language of the theatre is different from the language of fiction. And it’s no surprise that there are so few writers who worked successfully in both fiction and theatre. Arthur Miller wrote one novel and it’s terrible. James Joyce wrote one play and it’s bad. Samuel Beckett is one of the few exceptions.”
Martel admits that, as an author, he has control over every element in a book.
“In a way when I write I’m like God,” he said. “I order these little words around and line them up as I want them to be lined up, and if they don’t please me I delete them. I’m director, producer, actor, set designer.”
During the workshop he was surprised by how quickly things changed.
“I remember seeing Lolita take out something from the story and reassembling it somewhere else, Frankenstein-like,” he said. “That’s just the process of translating a book to the stage.”
The big challenge for the adapters, said Martel, was not creating a tiger or lifeboat.
“‘Life of Pi’ is essentially a domestic drama where very little happens,” he said. “It’s about someone sitting with a very difficult roommate. In the book I jumped around, feeding the reader little philosophical questions. The issue with the play was transferring an essentially static story so it worked dramatically.”
After having seen both the London and New York productions, Martel says the stage version of “Life of Pi” feels like attending a really good magic show.
“It’s like a card trick where you know how the magician did something — you’re even asked to participate in it — and it still impresses you.”
“Life of Pi” begins performances Tuesday and runs until Oct. 6 at the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre, 244 Victoria St. Visit mirvish.com or call 1-800-461-3333 for tickets and information.