Copyright Los Angeles Times
LONDON — Since its release in 2008, the relevance of Suzanne Collins’ dystopian novel “The Hunger Games” has grown in magnitude. The story, about a dictatorial government that forces children to fight to the death as part of an annual spectacle, continues to inspire reimagining. The latest iteration is a dynamic live play, set to debut Wednesday at London’s Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre. “The Hunger Games: On Stage” is both an adaptation of Collins’ novel, which has spawned two sequels and two prequels, and Lionsgate’s 2012 film, starring Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen. The opportunity came up seven years ago when Tristan Baker, who produced the show alongside Oliver Royds, met with Lionsgate about another potential project. Baker began developing a stage version of “Hunger Games” at the suggestion of Jenefer Brown, executive VP and head of global products and experiences for the studio. He’d recently worked with Conor McPherson on “Girl From the North Country,” a fictional interpretation of Bob Dylan’s song catalog, and thought the playwright might be interested. As it happened, McPherson’s daughter was reading the novel. “While it might seem obvious to say, Suzanne Collins is a brilliant storyteller,” McPherson said via email. “When I read ‘The Hunger Games,’ like everyone else I was drawn to the compelling energy of her narrator’s voice. She makes the momentum of Katniss’ story seem effortless. I thought that if we could cleave to Suzanne’s narrative drive, we could give the audience great pleasure.” Collins’ novel is narrated by Katniss, which McPherson wanted to incorporate. “It’s Katniss’ story,” he said. “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 said in October, speaking around the corner 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 also proved to be the most challenging element of the adaptation. “I wanted the show to be supremely theatrical in the sense that we would always be inside this girl’s psyche,” McPherson said. “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 final production is far grander. The producers built a new theater in Canary Wharf to house the play, which is currently set to run until October 2026. “At no point in that initial process did we say, ‘We’re going to build our own venue,’ ” Baker said. “It was all about how you tell that story in a theatrical way.” 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.” The creative team held a workshop with an ensemble cast, which includes some of the current actors, three years ago. When it came time to cast the lead roles earlier this year, Dunster used a “specific narrowing down process” to find the right performers. They met with around 200 dancers and selected 50 for fighting workshops, eventually ending up with 10 possible actors for the chorus, including Mia Carragher, who plays Katniss. Collins and Lionsgate signed off on the final decisions. “It was really difficult,” Dunster said of selecting the right person 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.” Only two of the actors, Carragher and Euan Garrett, who plays Peeta, have a single role. Everyone else plays multiple characters throughout the production, frequently changing costumes to ensure the world feels well-populated by citizens, gamemakers and tributes. In a clever bout of casting, John Malkovich plays President Snow. All of his scenes were shot on camera, which means he won’t appear live in the theater. “I asked if we could consider him,” Dunster said. “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 relies on large video screens and immersive effects. Sets come up through the floor and the cast flies through the air or climbs on the upper tiers of seats on wires. At one point, Carragher runs up a lighting rig. It’s a technically involved show, but also one that requires a lot of stamina and fitness from its cast. The cast rehearsed for 10 weeks beginning in August before moving into the theater for technical rehearsals. Carragher took an archery course in addition to the group training. 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 something in a different sort of realm, you have to make it different,” she said. “You really have to go for it.” Broom worked with the cast to create visual moments that emphasized the significance of a scene, whether it’s crafting the illusion of a character running a long distance on stage or embodying one of the terrifying mutts. “It’s theater choreography that is very heavily laid into the story,” she said. “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.” Although it’s notably technical and physical, the emotions had to come first for the actors. “It can be incredibly hard multitasking on stage,” Carragher said, speaking 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.” Carragher said, “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.” Ultimately, “The Hunger Games” is a story about children dying. Although the youngest cast member is 18, the play doesn’t pull any punches about its violent nature. Dunster thinks the play is even more brutal than the novel and the film 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 said. “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 live aspect of theater augments that feeling of destructive loss. “We don’t shy away from anything in the play,” Carragher said. “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.” Beyond its entertainment value, McPherson sees the play as both “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.”
