The Hunger Games on Stage | Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre | ★☆☆☆☆
Watching The Hunger Games on Stage makes it immediately obvious why The Hunger Games should not, in fact, be on stage.
Suzanne Collins’ trilogy of novels captured a generation for good reason, but it is not unfair to say the premise – a dystopian world in which 24 children are forced to slaughter each other for the entertainment of the rich – is fairly crude in its symbolism. In the books, it is Katniss’s narration that is able to inject the nuance but, placed on the less forgiving plane of the stage, the story struggles to deliver any emotional impact, and also, somewhat extraordinarily, fails to be visually impressive.
The latter is not for want of trying. Staged in the custom-built Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre, the production is full of gimmicks that, like Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, begs the audience to gush that the show is, at least, “a spectacle!” Sadly, for The Hunger Games on Stage (unlike its wizarding counterpart) a few arrow shots and some aerial combat are not enough wow-factor.
Likewise, the “innovation” of the staging – hammed up in the press material – amounted to little more than the seating blocks periodically moving to open up the ends of the stage. It would have been barely noticeable had I not read in advance to look out for it. There is some fire, true, but I’ve been more wowed by pyrotechnics at the honky tonk bar in Chiswick.
These frills are accompanied by an intentionally sparse set; a massive gantry spanning the stage takes the place of a tree while the cornucopia at the start is replaced with rucksacks hung from the ceiling. This is an active choice to allow the audience to “fill those spaces” with their “imagination”, according to director Matthew Dunster, though I more often found my eyes straying to watch Lily Allen (directed by Dunster in 2:22 A Ghost Story) sitting in the seating block opposite me.
As for the storytelling, rarely have I seen a worse case of telling, not showing. The action is regularly interrupted by laboured narration from Katniss, played by Mia Carragher in her professional stage debut. “Oh no – not him! That boy saved my life!,” she cries after Peeta is “reaped” to join her in the games, before launching into an explanation of how Peeta once saved her from starvation with a loaf of bread, a gesture that’s made her both grateful and resentful towards him. Don’t worry, you won’t need to expend any effort remembering this – you will be told in no uncertain terms, again and again, why Katniss is so unshakably angry.
The stilted narration also makes Katniss a more manipulative character than she is painted in the book. Distrustful towards Peeta’s declarations of love, she turns to the audience to self-narrate (“Don’t be a fool Katniss! I give him one of these”) before planting a kiss on his cheek – a pantomime gesture of surreptitiousness that leaves her motive far less ambiguous (and interesting) than in the novels.
The cast as a whole is athletic and energetic enough, and it’s not their fault they have little to work with. With little else to go on, and little time to establish their characters amid such a large ensemble, many opt instead simply to mimic their on-screen counterparts, to varying degrees of success. Indeed, President Snow, played by Donald Sutherland in the film adaptation, proves inimitable even by the acclaimed John Malkovich, who delivers his lines with such disinterest he seems barely aware he is in the production at all. Indeed, appearing only on a big screen, he *is* barely in the production at all: looming large, occasionally in Zoom-like quality, he is quite literally a two-dimensional presence.
With opening night branded “a shambles” by fans left queuing outside in the cold and the production starting over an hour late, you could say the gods did not smile upon The Hunger Games on Stage on press night. But that would be to be generous. The faults of this play are not just that the source material is difficult to stage (which it is) but that it fails to make the audience feel anything at all. Rather than the thrill of crashing and burning, the Girl on Fire simply fails to emit any sparks at all.