[title]
★★★
The big question with adapting The Hunger Games for the stage is that is it not totally nuts to adapt The Hunger Games for the stage? A substantial proportion of Suzanne Collins’s smash 2008 YA novel is set during the titular Games, which are a sort of gladiatorial reality TV contest in which heavily armed teens murder each other until there’s only one left,
Historically this sort of thing is not theatre’s strength. A cheeky duel, absolutely. But a half-hour plus nonstop combat sequence featuring 24 fighters and multiple sub-locations is… tricky. And to their credit, director Matthew Dunster and a top notch creative team do a pretty damn good job of finding a way forward, deploying aerial work, pyro, video screens, some tightly drilled choreography, the odd song and a highly mobile, rapidly changing set from Miriam Buether to create a sequence that’s coherent and gripping, even if it’s hard to really hand on heart say this is as effective a representation as the one in the beloved Jennifer Lawrence film (as much as anything, without close ups it’s very hard to follow who all the minor characters being killed off are).
But it’s solid, and I found it hard not to admire the quixotic but skilled attempt to translate something so action-packed to the stage.
a hybrid of The Running Man and The Devil Wears Prada
Dunster is not a subtle director, and in many ways that suits Collins’s novel. He picks out the themes of class oppression between the gaudy dandies of the Capitol and dirt poor folk of District 12 – from whence heroine Katniss Everdeen hails – with day glo aplomb. Smartly, the set of the-in-the round show (staged in the purpose built Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre) is steeply raked to resemble a sports stadium or the audience seating in a TV studio - we are implicitly cast as spectators to the games, with the action sequences lifted (and clarified) by the slickly amoral host Caesar Flickerman (Stavros Demetraki). It never feels like it lectures you on its themes, it’s just very obvious what they are, and it’s at least as good on Katniss’s bemused dabbling with the world of celebrity as the fighty stuff – Nathan Ives-Moiba gives a very nice turn as Cinna, Katniss’s flamboyant but nurturing stylist. At its best it finds its groove as a sort of hybrid of The Running Man and The Devil Wears Prada.
There are problems, however. Mia Carragher is certainly up to the considerable physical demands of playing Katniss, and maybe that’s why she got the role – there are no stunt doubles here. But she’s somewhat light on the ol’ charisma and she talks in a breathy Marilyn Monroe-style accent that is odd bordering on distracting. She’s not helped by Conor McPherson’s adaptation, which casts her as both protagonist and narrator. It’s true that there’s a lot to explain. But in such an action heavy format, having the lead character constantly offering background on what’s going on undermines the sense of her living in a dangerous moment.
I wasn’t sold on the casting of a pre-recorded John Malkovich as the manipulative President Snow – it’s somewhat disorientating to have a famous American actor appear at massive scale on the screens every now and again, and the scenes where Malkovich is ‘talking’ to a live performer just feel a bit of an odd thing to be watching. There is plenty of spectacle here already and I don’t feel it needed to go all out to accommodate a weird cameo from a medium famous actor.
Ultimately The Hunger Games: On Stage is pretty different to the film and its strongest moments are its most theatrical: the introduction, where the inhabitants of Sector 12 rise from the floor to the thunderous sounds of Fuck Buttons’ ‘Sweet Love for Planet Earth’, is in some ways more thrilling than the fighting; weird, alluring bits of singing and dancing make you wonder if there might not have actually been something in a musical; in general it’s superb on evoking the decadent world of the Capitol – a parade of grotesque fops flooding the room says basically everything you need to know about the place in just a few seconds.
The Hunger Games: On Stage will stand or fall on how much people like the very long action sequence that takes up most of the second half. I didn’t think it was so utterly thrilling that it vindicates the play in and of itself, but I did think Dunster and team do a credible job that won’t turn off fans of book or film. Is that enough? I wonder if a new story set in the Hunger Games world might not have been a better idea at the end of the day: more of a USP, less dependent on a single sequence.
You can be as cynical as you want about big budget stage adaptations of popular IPs, but the fact is a lot of creative talent has been poured into this. It’s hardly hack work. And it’s very nearly great – just a stronger lead away from triumph.
Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre, booking to Oct 24 2026.
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