The Hunger Games: On Stage, review – Dazzling bits of stage trickery bring this dark dystopia to life
If you’re after nerve-shredding, movie-style spectacle, then this big but unsubtle staging of The Hunger Games might just add a welcome chill to your winter. Here is a theatrical addition to the multibillion-grossing young adult book and movie franchise that explodes across a purpose-built arena-style theatre. There are wince-inducing fight scenes, eyebrow-singeing bursts of fire, and dazzling bits of stage trickery. Its tensest moments plunge the audience right into this dangerous world – as though you’re fighting for your life, along with its cast of embattled teens.
Olivier Award-winning playwright Conor McPherson and director Matthew Dunster have set this dystopian tale in a drab, delicately evoked version of Depression-era America, where the inhabitants of District 12 eke out a living amid coal-mining disasters and food shortages. A chorus of townsfolk sway like sun-bleached clothes on a washing line, powerless and adrift, in choreographer Charlotte Broom’s evocative movement sequences. It’s time for Reaping Day, an annual tradition during which two teenage tributes are selected to compete in a televised battle to the death against the other districts’ chosen fighters. Only one will survive.
A 21-year-old Mia Carragher (daughter of ex-Liverpool and England footballer Jamie) is fierce and impressively athletic in her stage debut as protagonist and narrator, the archer Katniss Everdeen – a role made famous by Jennifer Lawrence on screen. And Dunster certainly puts her through her paces, making Carragher sprint round the vast stage over and over, as if she’s trapped in a more-than-usually sadistic school sports day. Her battles with the other tributes are achingly tense: especially when they’re evoked in hand-to-hand combat, rather than lyrical but slightly confusing dance sequences. At the show’s climax, Carragher scales a precarious steel beam high above her jeering rivals’ heads as flames lick at her heels – the danger is palpable.
Like its fight-for-your-life successor, Netflix’s Squid Game (2021), this is a story that feels incredibly current, with its narrative of a slathering media that capitalises on human suffering. Dunster amps up this reality TV element, with gleeful telly hosts crashing into Katniss’s humble living room. There’s a real cruelty to the way that Katniss and her fellow tribute Peeta (Euan Garrett) are manipulated into performing their uncertain romance for the cameras, and their awkward relationship is beautifully captured here. What this adaptation doesn’t do, though, is give the audience enough space to get truly invested in this story.
An arena like this should be perfectly suited to getting the crowd cheering on their favourites. But although this production names each seating bank after one of the warring districts, the interactivity stops there. OK, two of the seating banks move, which would be impressive – if it was more than just a practical strategy to ensure everyone can see the big screens displaying pre-recorded video segments of a completely underwhelming John Malkovich as the tyrannical President Snow. Such aliterally two-dimensional character could never come into his own as the Machiavellian force behind this twisted world. The ill-considered decisions continue with the cramped layout of this new theatre venue. Fighting through crowds in search of an interval drink turns into a fraught (if thematically appropriate) Hunger Games of its own.
The Hunger Games is an odd kind of dystopia. Yes, the world it portrays is a horrific mirror of our own, with the frivolous moneyed elites of its Capitol gawking and giggling as impoverished teens die for their entertainment. But the millions of girls in its fanbase love it also because of the subtly utopian promise buried in its story, which depicts a world where women can fight alongside men as equals. This regime may try to kill Katniss but they never cast doubt on her strength, or suitability as a champion.
McPherson’s adaptation fails to comprehend this: instead, he makes too much of Katniss and her sister’s pretty dresses, and not enough of their raging sense of injustice. This team has staged The Hunger Games with all the bells, bangs and whistles you’d expect, but it hasn’t truly understood the appeal of its source material – and that is why it is doomed to remain just another contestant in London theatre’s endless, brutal battle for the ticket-buying public’s favour.
‘The Hunger Games: On Stage’ is at the Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre until October 2026
