Friday, December 03, 2021
Life of Pi review – the animals are the stars in this puppet-powered show
Theatre | The Guardian: Life of Pi had a first life as a Booker prize-winning novel by Yann Martel and a second as an Oscar-winning film by Ang Lee. Both were utterly captivating. Now comes playwright Lolita Chakrabarti’s stage spectacular (first presented in Sheffield in 2019) about Piscine “Pi” Patel, the zookeeper’s son from Pondicherry who claims to have survived a shipwreck in a life-raft with a Bengal tiger in tow.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
When I first read Life of Pi, I was so enthralled with the boy who survived a shipwreck with a tiger in tow. When I first watched Life of Pi in the theaters, the movie hit different than the book ~ I now saw themed of hope and optimism, which my younger self had looked past in her reading. And now that there exists a theatrical production of this amazing story, I cannot help but be super excited for the day when I witness this story live.
I feel like Life of Pi is one of the stories which are so full of heart that somehow I cannot imagine any type of retelling of this story capable of ruining the magic, because the heart lies in the mere dialogues of the story. From the point of the article writer, it seems like enactment on stage lacked but that was made up by the visual effects. I feel like with that it is just clear that with more work, this theatrical version could gain the same traction and love that the book and the movie did.
I had a hard time getting a read on whether I'd want to see this show if I were given the chance. While the author definitely highlighted it's good parts like the philosophical aspects, puppet design and handling, and visual effects it confused me that they immediately said the effects overshadowed the philosophical aspects. Is it a case of good idea bad execution where the timing of these elements overlapped when they shouldn't have all the time or only in specific cases? Were all the elements of the show in direct conflict with one another to the point where the moments were ruined? I feel like this may have been a case similar to King Kong. King Kong had intricate and difficult puppetry with the operators literally scaling and using their body weight to move the giant limbs in such a lifelike way but the story just wasn't engaging. It sounds like something similar happened here with a disconnect between story and storytellers.
This is really not a positive review. It;s amusing to me that everyone has decided to make this story over and over again. I guess it makes sense to turn a book into a movie and everyone who I saw it with really enjoyed the movie. That might also be a function of less people having read the book ahead of time and therefore having some preconceived notion. This third rendition just seems like a difficult move right from the beginning because there’s no way you can capture people with such vibrant scenes as you can on the big screen and therefore you have to rely on spectacle. Which its sounds like they tried to do at the cost of character development and performance. The puppets do look pretty impressive and if I remember correctly, the story has a strong dichotomy of large scale action and then very quiet moments.
Post a Comment