Kevin Klassen, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Troy Feldman, Davinder Malhi in Life of Pi, Citadel Theatre/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Lighting by April Viczko, projections by Corwin Ferguson, set by Beyata Hackborn. Photo by Nanc Price
By Liz Nicholls,
A boy. A tiger. The vast Pacific. Onstage. How can it be?
A sense of wonder — in both the fantastical story and the thrilling theatricality of its telling — is the currency of the Life of Pi, the captivating production that launches the Citadel’s 60th anniversary season. A story of improbable survival conjoined to improbable theatre magic: what better way to celebrate an odds-defying birthday in the life, full of many firsts, of an influential theatre that started small, yes, but bold and risky in 1965.
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Based on the 2001 Booker Prize-winning novel of Yann Martel, adapted by the English actor/playwright Lolita Chakrabarti, Life of Pi brings to the stage— in a dazzling collaboration of light, sound, set, puppets and humans — the story of a teenager shipwrecked on a 1970s voyage from India to Canada. Pi Patel (Davinder Malhi, who’s wonderful) spends 227 traumatic days in a lifeboat with a quartet of zoo animals, and in the end one Royal Bengal tiger (who’s also wonderful), before he washes up in Mexico.
Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Troy Feldman, Davinder Malhi in The Life of Pi, Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.
Pi (short for Piscine, French for swimming pool) Patel has nicknamed himself after the elusive, never-ending 3.14… of mathematics, “an irrational number … not easy to describe,” as he explains at the outset. Ah, his story in a nutshell. When the Japanese cargo ship carrying the Patels and their family zoo from Pondicherry in India to Canada meets its doom in a terrible storm, Pi’s family, his mother Amma (Deena Aziz), father (Suchiththa Wickremesooriya, understudying Omar Alex Khan on opening night) and sister (Anaka Maharaj-Sandhu), are lost. And Pi, an orangutan, a zebra, a hyena and the fateful tiger, somehow survive. Gradually (and viscerally), the crowded head, hoof, and paw count of the lifeboat is reduced by the tiger, enigmatically named Richard Parker because of a shipping clerk error. And so a lifelong vegetarian meets a formidable carnivore, eye to eye, at close quarters. A power struggle ensues. “It’s just you and me… Are we dead Richard Parker?”
Deena Aziz, Troy Felman Davinder Malhi in Life of Pi, Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.
As we see in lively earlier scenes on terra firms in India, Pi is a precocious kid who exasperates his parents by signing on with the Hindus, the Catholics, and Muslims because he finds similarities in their storytelling. “Nobody has three religions,” says Amma. “You have to choose.” Pi won’t pick. In fact, he’ll offer us alternate versions of his own sea adventure, so we can decide which is the best story.
Davinder Malhi in Life of Pi, Citadel/Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.
It takes considerable theatrical resourcefulness and magical stagecraft to bring Pi’s story to the stage. The animals of the cast are puppets, physical and emotional players in the story — to a visceral degree that sometimes makes you flinch. It might horrify you to see what a hyena can do, much less a tiger. And since they’re puppets it takes imaginative participation both from the artists onstage and us. It’s always that way with bringing puppets to life: you have to believe. And in Haysam Kadri’s Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre co-production, the first at a Canadian regional theatre after Life of Pi’s West End and Broadway incarnations, you do.
Calgary-based Puppet Stuff Canada (led by designers Brendon James Boys and Reese Scott) creates the animal cast. And the expertise of the puppeteers led by Troy Feldman and Braydon Dowler-Coltman (who succeed because you cease to notice them) sets them in motion: uncannily detailed movements, rhythms, breaths. And their joint pièce de résistance is Richard Parker, in his full and terrifying glory, pouncing, panting, leaping and prowling, spring-loaded for zero to 60 in a dangerous second. Whole schools of luminescent fish swim by, on poles carried by the ensemble; sea turtles appear and disappear. Joelysa Pankanea’s compositions and sound capture the ominous and the magical.
Bailey Chin, Daviner Malhi, Kevin Klassen in Life of Pi, Citadel/ Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre. Photo by Nanc Price.
The warm-hued world of the Patels on dry land, and the beautiful, scary seascapes conjured by lighting designer April Vicki and video/projection designer Corwin Ferguson play out across a kind of outsized upstage bubble (set design Beyata Hackborn). Think snow globe but made of water. There’s a kind of poetry in them that’s alive in the mental landscape of Pi the philosopher who, even in extremity, ponders the majesty of the universe (“the heavens are miraculous!”). What his skeptical questioners post-journey call “impossible,” he calls “unexpected.” There are more things in heaven and earth … as another of theatre’s star philosophers has said.
This is not easily conveyed in the language of an adaptation that has its inert moments, for example, in its cumbersome framing device of questions from a Japanese insurance adjuster and a Canadian consular official. But in his compelling and vivid performance as Pi, who’s both the storyteller and a (very) active participant, Malhi makes it all seem seem natural, sometimes amusing, sometimes poignant. He’s a perfect Pi — slight, agile, boyish, a capture of a traumatized character on a quest to stay alive. He moves in and out of a memory or nightmare, struck by terror and beauty, possibly hallucinating an island of meerkats or an admiral (amusingly played by Garett Ross), who appears, magically, to offer pointers about survival at sea. Sometime he’s reduced to panic; sometimes he’s wonderstruck (which seems to be where the novel sits) by the tenacity of life itself that joins boy and tiger, human and animal. The ensemble is busy and dexterous in multiple roles.
I remember wondering about the story, as culled for the stage from the novel, when I saw the Broadway production a couple of years ago. And then giving up and just enjoying the theatrical magic of it, and the performances that bring it to life. And the same thing happened this time, with this production. “My story will make you believe in God,” says Pi early on. Possibly. But certainly in theatre.
Check out the preview interview with Puppet Stuff’s Brendon James Boyd is here.
REVIEW
Life of Pi
Theatre: Citadel and Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre
Written by: Lolita Chakrabarti, adapted from the Yann Martel novel
Directed by: Haysam Kadri
Puppetry director: Dayna Tietzen
Starring: Davinder Malhi, Deena Aziz, Omar Alex Khan, Andrea Cheung, Bailey Chin, Braydon Dowler-Coltman, Troy Felman, N. Girgis, Kevin Klassen, Azeem Nato, Kristen Padayas, Garett Ross, Anaka Maharaj-Sandhu, Suchiththa Wickremesooriya
Running: Saturday (in preview) through October. 5
Tickets: citadeltheatre.com, 780-425-1820
