From the start, “The Hunger Games on Stage” feels dystopian. Taking place in Canary Wharf, London’s ultra-modern financial district, the stage adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ beloved novel is the antithesis of a West End production with its historic, ornate theaters. In fact, it’s hard to even single out the brand-new, purpose-built Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre from the rest of the warehouse-style buildings on the canal — until you spot a large, bronze Mocking Jay on its roof.
Matthew Dunster, the Olivier- and Tony-nominated director known for his work on the West End’s “2:22 A Ghost Story” and Broadway’s “Hangmen,” always wanted it to be this way. “You’re in the Capitol,” he tells Variety over Zoom the day before “The Hunger Games on Stage” officially opens. “It adds to it. And I just think you don’t expect to find a big, creative, artistic project in that place. Even where it is, hidden behind Dishoom and next to the canals, you’ve gotta find it.”
After scanning their tickets, audience members are assigned a district between 1 and 11 — the stage serves as district 12 — and embark on a maze of sorts to find their appropriate section. To get to district 5, I walked up a staircase, down a hallway, past the bar and through another dark passageway before locating my seat. The theater itself is set up like an arena, with the show performed in the round and all seats raised above it — as if the audience is truly watching children fight to the death live. During certain scenes, the seats at either end of the stage move to allow set pieces and actors through, and when a tribute from your district dies, the corresponding section of the audience flashes red. On a lighter note, the layout also encourages audience participation when zany Hunger Games host Caesar Flickerman takes the stage, with exclamations like “laughter,” “awww” and “boo” displayed on screens and willingly shouted by viewers.
“We wanted to make people implicit, whether that’s in a fun way or a way of making them really think about what it is they’re watching,” Dunster says of the theater’s set-up, which was designed by Miriam Buether, who also worked on the recent West End and Broadway production of “Stranger Things: The First Shadow.”
Johan Persson
Indeed, it’s not every day that a theater is built specifically for a show. The 1,200-seat Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre started construction just eight months ago and was, Dunster admits, barely finished by the time of the first preview on Oct. 20. All together the show and theater cost £26 million ($34 million), giving the creative team the freedom to go all-out — and they did, with several risers bringing sets and actors up from the floor, aerial stunts, pyrotechnics and two huge screens used to project graphics and video.
“I mean you can’t do that anywhere else,” Dunster says, calling the process “thrilling” and “once in a lifetime.” “‘Hi, Matthew! Do you want us to build you a theater?’ How many times is that going to happen?”
But the strength of a show is often only as strong as its lead, and Dunster had huge shoes to fill in finding a Katniss to embody Jennifer Lawrence’s sharp, spunky heroine — and take on both the dialogic (Conor McPherson’s script sticks to Collins’ original first-person narrative) and physical demands of the show. “It’s like Hamlet,” Dunster says of Katniss’ role. “It’s just a massive, massive part.”
Enter Mia Carragher. The 21-year-old, who is making her stage debut with “Hunger Games,” stood out to Dunster at the first auditions, which were dance-focused. The next round was combat, and Carragher shined again. “She was fierce,” Dunster recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh God, I hope she can act.’”
Johan Persson
He was in luck: Carragher trained at the Tring Park School for the Performing Arts in England before setting off to New York City at 18 to attend the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute, known for its Method acting education. “That’s the kind of young woman she is,” Dunster says. “She’s just got all the tools, and it’s very rare to find that in someone who is very young.”
“The Hunger Games” play sees Carragher run laps around the stage, climb scaffolding, soar into the air and, of course, employ Katniss’ signature bow-and-arrow skills. Good thing she comes from a family of athletes — her dad is football analyst and former Liverpool player Jamie Carragher, her mom a marathon runner and her brother a professional footballer.
“That was really reassuring. I just thought, it will be in her DNA,” Dunster says. “She’s never complained once about an injury or tiredness. She just gets up, does it, and gets up and does it again. I’m a big fan.”
Carragher’s Katniss leads an ensemble of 21, mostly made up of young people aged 18 to 24, many of whom play multiple parts. “I wanted you to fall in love with the performers for all that they can do, all their brilliance, so that when they are slaughtered it’s even more devastating,” Dunster says.
There is something especially brutal about seeing “The Hunger Games” play out on stage — and in an arena setting, where it feels like a true exhibition that audiences are actively taking part in. Dunster says this is the whole point.
“I want people to be thrilled by the spectacle, but in terms of the message, it’s so simple. It’s just three words: don’t kill kids,” he says. “And that’s still happening all over the world. They’re being starved, they’re being killed, there’s a kind of ‘Hunger Games’ going on. So it felt like a real responsibility to be making the show right now.”
One character viewers don’t see on stage is President Snow, played by a stoic John Malkovich. Instead, the Oscar-nominated actor appears on the stage’s large screens to deliver several speeches and interact with Katniss.
“You go to any inauguration, most people witness the president or whatever on a screen. You go to the Oasis concert, most of you experience Liam Gallagher on a screen,” Dunster says. “So we associate it with power and scale and presentation.”
Johan Persson
This also helped the production to snag a star in the booked-and-busy Malkovich, who was on Dunster’s mind because he’s appearing in his friend Martin McDonagh’s next film. “I knew he’d seen a show of mine in New York a few years ago; I just thought let’s aim high. And he said yeah,” Dunster says. “We did a day’s filming with him and he turned up and knew every line.”
As “Hunger Games on Stage” prepares to officially open on Thursday night, Dunster acknowledges that the show’s previews have been a learning process. The team has had to do a fair amount of cutting, he says, taking the play from nearly three hours to two hours and 15 minutes. The first preview on Oct. 20 was particularly difficult, when a cast injury delayed the show’s start — leaving some audience members queuing in the rain — and unfinished construction on the building led to complaints about accessibility. Some even took to social media, leading to a mild controversy.
“I take some responsibility for that first preview. When we were discussing whether to do the show or not — I mean, I didn’t know this would mean leaving people outside in the rain — I said, ‘I just feel that we’ve got to do it,’” Dunster says, pointing out that he knew some people were traveling to London just to see it. “The show’s not ready, we’ve had an injury, the building definitely wasn’t ready — but if it’s safe, we should do it. And it was safe, but it wasn’t accessible. And that’s really sad.”
Dunster adds that by the second preview, the accessibility issues had been sorted. “It took one day. So maybe we should have opened the second day, but some people would have missed out,” he says. “And because we made that decision, it just meant that there were problems.” (For the record, when this journalist saw the show on Nov. 11, it was smooth-sailing despite a lingering new-paint smell.)
“The Hunger Games on Stage” is already extended through October 2026, with shows until the end of the year running low on tickets. So would Dunster direct further installments of Collins’ series for stage?
“I can’t imagine, if it’s a success, that people wouldn’t want to do the other books,” he says. “For me as an artist, it would be, do I think I could do anything different with the other stories? Or would I be more excited about passing the baton on? I think it could be really cool if it was in the same space but a different creative team made the next one.”
Broadway ambitions may be more up Dunster’s ally, even if the show would have to adjust to fit into a theater on the Great White Way. “I would like to be part of, certainly at the beginning, adapting it for a more conventional place if we needed to do that in any territory,” he says, though he later adds: “If we did go to America, it would seem a shame not to build something really fucking cool in Brooklyn.”
