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LONDON — Since its launch in 2008, the relevance of Suzanne Collins’ dystopian novel “The Hunger Games” has grown in magnitude. The story, a few dictatorial authorities that forces kids to struggle to the dying as a part of an annual spectacle, continues to encourage reimagining. The newest iteration is a dynamic stay play, set to debut Wednesday at London’s Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre.
“The Hunger Games: On Stage” is each an adaptation of Collins’ novel, which has spawned two sequels and two prequels, and Lionsgate’s 2012 movie, starring Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen. The chance got here up seven years in the past when Tristan Baker, who produced the present alongside Oliver Royds, met with Lionsgate about one other potential undertaking. Baker started creating a stage model of “Hunger Games” on the suggestion of Jenefer Brown, government VP and head of worldwide merchandise and experiences for the studio. He’d just lately labored with Conor McPherson on “Girl From the North Country,” a fictional interpretation of Bob Dylan’s music catalog, and thought the playwright is perhaps . Because it occurred, McPherson’s daughter was studying the novel.
The manufacturing maintains protagonist Katniss’ narrative voice.
(Johan Persson)
Collins’ novel is narrated by Katniss, which McPherson wished to include. “It’s Katniss’ story,” he mentioned. “Her voice is a huge part of what makes ‘The Hunger Games’ so potent, so I wanted to let her continue to speak for herself.”
“The dystopian novels that stick in my mind are the ones where we’re with somebody in a very singular way,” director Matthew Dunster mentioned in October, talking across the nook from the still-being-finished Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre. “Our Katniss talks to our audience in the way that Katniss talks from the pages of the book.”
That additionally proved to be essentially the most difficult component of the variation. “I wanted the show to be supremely theatrical in the sense that we would always be inside this girl’s psyche,” McPherson mentioned. “The show would spring from her imagination and the audience’s imagination would engage with hers to complete the picture. I initially said to the producers that we should be able to tell this story using a table and four chairs.”
The ultimate manufacturing is way grander. The producers constructed a brand new theater in Canary Wharf to accommodate the play, which is at the moment set to run till October 2026. “At no point in that initial process did we say, ‘We’re going to build our own venue,’ ” Baker mentioned. “It was all about how you tell that story in a theatrical way.”
“We ended up designing the space around ‘The Hunger Games,’” said producer Tristan Baker.
(Johan Persson)
Because the show involves wirework and understage lifts, it was easier to construct a custom space than it would have been to use an existing West End theater. “It became clear as we were talking with the team with Matthew and then designers that we could do it in the round and we could do some things that would blow people’s minds,” Baker said. “Some of the seating banks move. We ended up designing the space around ‘The Hunger Games.’ ”
Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre is constructed like an arena. Audience members buy seats in specific districts (District 12 is the stage) and some of the seating sections move at various points in the play, which reconfigures the space. It also impacts the emotional resonance of a scene.
“It’s amazing to be able to start a scene between two people that’s intimate and you feel, as an audience member, ‘I’m miles away from those people,’ ” Dunster said. “And then as those characters become more intimate, suddenly you’re in a much more intimate relationship with them.”
Collins has since expanded the universe of Panem, most recently with “Sunrise on the Reaping,” released in March. With her blessing, McPherson added details into the play that acknowledge information revealed in the newer novels. Some of the tributes who were unnamed in the original book now have names. There are a few scenes that are new for the play.
“There’s lovely Easter eggs all the way through that you wouldn’t have gotten from the first book or the first film,” Baker said.
Dunster had previously collaborated with Baker on “2:22 — A Ghost Story.” When Baker approached him to direct, Dunster’s kids were also coincidentally reading “The Hunger Games.” Once he picked up the novel himself, he found it undeniably timely. He wanted to approach it in a less traditional way than might be expected.
“I very quickly got the idea that if the young people that play the tributes were also pretty much playing everyone else, then you would fall in love with them as performers,” Dunster said. “Then the horror that is visited upon them would be even more devastating. Not least because we’re talking about the destruction of young lives and the destruction of talent and the waste of the Hunger Games. I was interested and intrigued to see if we could find a form that made that even more profound.”
Nathanael Saleh and Kyerron Dixon-Bassey in rehearsal for “The Hunger Games: On Stage.” The solid rehearsed for 10 weeks starting in August earlier than shifting into the theater for technical rehearsals.
(Danny Kaan)
The inventive workforce held a workshop with an ensemble solid, which incorporates a few of the present actors, three years in the past. When it got here time to solid the lead roles earlier this yr, Dunster used a “specific narrowing down process” to seek out the fitting performers. They met with round 200 dancers and chosen 50 for combating workshops, ultimately ending up with 10 attainable actors for the refrain, together with Mia Carragher, who performs Katniss. Collins and Lionsgate signed off on the ultimate choices.
“It was really difficult,” Dunster mentioned of choosing the fitting individual to embody Katniss. “There are requirements that feel they are indicated by the book and the film. We looked very widely. I found it very hard at the beginning and my brilliant costume director said to me, ‘Matthew, Jennifer Lawrence isn’t going to walk through that door.’ That freed me.”
John Malkovich’s scenes as President Snow had been shot on digital camera.
(Johan Persson)
Solely two of the actors, Carragher and Euan Garrett, who performs Peeta, have a single position. Everybody else performs a number of characters all through the manufacturing, steadily altering costumes to make sure the world feels well-populated by residents, gamemakers and tributes. In a intelligent bout of casting, John Malkovich performs President Snow. All of his scenes had been shot on digital camera, which suggests he gained’t seem stay within the theater.
“I asked if we could consider him,” Dunster mentioned. “He had just wrapped a movie with one of my friends who I work with a lot, Martin McDonagh. I’m not sure what made him say yes, but he did it and he was a real professional and gentleman. We filmed him in one shooting, but took all of our cast with us so he was actually doing his scenes with our actors. This was a good way of him committing to a play without committing to it.”
The staging depends on giant video screens and immersive results. Units come up by way of the ground and the solid flies by way of the air or climbs on the higher tiers of seats on wires. At one level, Carragher runs up a lighting rig. It’s a technically concerned present, but in addition one which requires lots of stamina and health from its solid. The solid rehearsed for 10 weeks starting in August earlier than shifting into the theater for technical rehearsals. Carragher took an archery course along with the group coaching.
Kiera Milward and Imogen Brooke rehearse a struggle for “The Hunger Games: On Stage.”
(Danny Kaan)
Choreographer Charlotte Broom, a longtime collaborator of Dunster‘s, came on board in 2023. She was part of the early workshops and wanted to ensure the staging expanded on what the film already did.
“If you’re going to do one thing in a special type of realm, you need to make it completely different,” she mentioned. “You really have to go for it.”
Broom labored with the solid to create visible moments that emphasised the importance of a scene, whether or not it’s crafting the phantasm of a personality working a protracted distance on stage or embodying one of many terrifying mutts.
“It’s theater choreography that is very heavily laid into the story,” she mentioned. “And it has to work from every angle, including the seats at the top, which almost have an aerial view. The performers have been really invested and helped to solve problems and make things work.”
Though it’s notably technical and bodily, the feelings needed to come first for the actors.
“It can be incredibly hard multitasking on stage,” Carragher mentioned, talking with Garrett from her dressing room. “You have to be so hyperaware. You have to make sure you’re safe and that things are in place for the next scene.”
“There are really intense scenes and meanwhile I’m thinking, ‘I can’t let my knife fall off the cornucopia,’ ” Garrett added. “You can be so in the moment and then you’re suddenly clipping yourself into a harness and climbing onto something. Obviously safety is first, but it’s really about trying to be safe and deliver an authentic performance.”
Redmand Rance and Rory Toms in “The Hunger Games: On Stage.”
(Johan Persson)
Carragher mentioned, “And that you’re with the character. Every time we do a scene, I find out more about Katniss, like, ‘She would do this’ or ‘She wouldn’t do this.’ I’m probably Katniss more than I’m Mia at the moment. It’s been cool to see [the characters] evolve the more we’re rehearsing and performing.”
In the end, “The Hunger Games” is a narrative about kids dying. Though the youngest solid member is eighteen, the play doesn’t pull any punches about its violent nature. Dunster thinks the play is much more brutal than the novel and the movie and says that “the deaths and the dead are a very big part of our experience.”
“Based on the world that we find ourselves in, I’ve just kept coming back to these same three words: Don’t kill kids,” he mentioned. “There’s a real responsibility right now to be making a show called ‘The Hunger Games’ when it seems people are being systematically starved to a point where they’re desperate. That is literally happening in the world. Not with the glamour of a ‘Hunger Games’ spectacle, but the machinations of the state are the same. So that feels like a responsibility.”
The stay side of theater augments that feeling of harmful loss.
“We don’t shy away from anything in the play,” Carragher mentioned. “It’s not glamorized. The story is horrendous and you see it right in front of your eyes.”
“It is a really sad story and quite a powerful story,” Garrett added. “Kids are dying, and the audience has paid money to see a bloodbath. Maybe people can leave with a sense of ‘Are we part of it? Are we doing enough? Are we not saying enough?’ It’s always been a powerful story — that’s why Suzanne wrote it and that’s why it’s still going.”
Past its leisure worth, McPherson sees the play as each “a reminder and a warning,” like George Orwell’s “1984.”
“Given the right circumstances, human beings can willingly, even joyfully, dominate and torture other human beings,” he says. “What ‘The Hunger Games’ also reflects about today is the complicity of media outlets as a propaganda tool. When dictators become celebrities and their atrocities become clickbait, they are almost beyond satire, which makes them especially dangerous.”
