Life of Pi was awarded five Olivier Awards at a ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London in April 2022. Writer Lolita Chakrabarti was honoured with Best New Play. Lolita Chakrabarti’s dazzling stage adaption of Yann Martel’s award-winning book at the Wyndham’s Theatre in London’s West End at a special media night on Wednesday 8 June at 7.30 pm.
Lolita Chakrabarti OBE is an award-winning playwright and actress. Her writing credits include: Red Velvet which opened at the Tricycle Theatre in London in 2012, returning in 2014 before transferring to New York and the West End; Red Velvet was nominated for nine major awards including two Olivier Awards. Lolita won the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Most Promising Playwright, The Critics Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright and the AWA Award for Arts and Culture.
In an exclusive two-part Zoom interview with Asian Voice, Lolita told us, “When I was approached to do this in 2016, it was an absolute yes. I love this book. I had no idea how to do it at all. But I instinctively felt like I understood what he was trying to say. And that weird thing with writing where you can't necessarily articulate it, but you can feel that there's something really important within it. I began working on it and I didn't know this is an enormous book, but you say it's a modern classic and people love it. Everyone I spoke to, had a relationship with it. They'd either read it or seen the film or their mentors read it or knew about it. Everyone's question was, how are you going to do the tiger on stage? By then, I didn't know, I thought I just have to tell the story.”
“I didn't get nervous about it until the first preview. So we opened in Sheffield in 2019, it was the first preview and we've been through five weeks, lots of workshops. of developing the story and how to do the puppets. How do we get five puppets on a boat with an actor and each puppet requires two or three puppeteers? That's a lot of bodies on the stage. How do we do it and make it interesting and tell you to know, not just be a sort of car crash of bodies?” she added.
The actors did an amazing job but she said that it was bumpy because it was an open dress rehearsal. “So things went wrong, as they do, but the audience was just live it was fabulous. There was literally a gasp, but by the interval and oh my god, I knew okay, it was working,” Lolita told the newsweekly.
Commenting on the future of women in art in the post-pandemic world, Lolita Chakrabarti said, “Well, it's a great time to be a woman. I'll put that down. I think there's never enough opportunity. I think the world has been run by men for a very long time. And although it's changed, and it's changing, and it's great, there's a long way to go. So, yes, there are many more opportunities now than there were. But I think we're on a sort of faultline of change where it has suddenly cracked and everyone's gone. Oh my god, there is so much injustice in the world, we need to do something because I don't know whether we've all been sitting at home because of the pandemic and we've actually been confronted with it on our screens because that's the window to the world. And we've got I had no idea that those people suffered that or those people felt like that. So maybe that concentration of thinking it's like a mindfulness exercise, isn't it? We're going crazy at home and watching our screens to see what the world is about. Yes, it is. It is a good time it is but gosh, I'm always thinking it could be better.”
Part two of this interview will be published in the coming weeks in Asian Voice.
