Turns out destroying things is indeed easier than making them

Yes that's a quote from The Hunger Games

Mia Carragher as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games on Stage at the Troubadour Theatre Canary Wharf. Photo: Johan Persson © 2025 Lions Gate Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved

Well. It grieves me, but I would rather guzzle a handful of Nightlock berries* than sit through The Hunger Games On Stage a second time.

What I’ve seen

It is fascinating, isn’t it, how you can spend millions of dollars, employ hugely impressive creative talents (writer Conor McPherson, director Matthew Dunster, designer Moi Tran) to adapt proven, smash hit source material (Suzanne Collins’s trilogy of YA novels, plus a bit of the blockbuster films that have been made from them, which I loved), have a massive, brand new theatre kitted out exactly to your high-tech specifications, and still end up with a dud.

(*a type of poisonous berry that contributes to a pivotal plot point)

In case you haven’t the slightest idea what The Hunger Games is, here’s as brief a synopsis as possible – the country of Panem is ruled by a vicious dictatorship headed by President Snow (John Malkovitch, on a screen and a fraction out of sync, which may explain why he seems to have a gun to his head), based in the wealthy Capitol.

This affluent city, here so replete with food and light and colour that it resembles a cross between the Emerald City and Austin Powers’s shag pad, is in stark contrast to the Districts beyond it, defined by their industry (luxury goods production, timber, coal mining etc) and numbered according to their affluence. The higher the number, the deeper the poverty.

Katniss Everdeen is a resourceful girl of 16 who lives in District 12 with her mother, Asterid, and sister, Prim(rose). Every day she ducks under the electrified fence surrounding their home (not difficult, with less than three hours of power a day), and hunts or fishes in the forbidden zone, trading her catch on the black market to keep her family alive.

Don’t worry, we’re nearly there. As a result of a ‘peace’ agreement imposed the last time the Capitol put down a popular uprising, every year each District must offer up a boy and a girl (starting at age 12 and going up to 18) for the television event of the year, The Hunger Games, which pits them all against each other in a murderous survival contest in which there can be only one victor.

Anyway, 12 year-old Prim’s name gets picked, and Katniss impulsively volunteers in her place, going into the Games with the baker’s boy Peeta who, it transpires, once saved her life by giving her bread. The twist of the Games is, of course, that at least one of them must die for the other to survive.

There is a trigger warning that themes of “death, suicide and guilt” are on display, as well as murder and manslaughter. Unfortunately the play itself is dead on arrival.

The script has no zip (there’s no sign of McPherson’s hand in this, I can only assume it was slapped away by the film studio), the characters have no warmth or depth; and the vast in-the-round stage, complete with gliding banks of seating and an impressive bespoke central section that sinks and rises repeatedly to reveal each new set, feels a very long way away.

Huge screens show the zingy graphics that are part of the Games’s televising, but the big pink “APPLAUSE” and “WOOOOO” prompts that keep flashing up to encourage the ‘studio’ audience to react to the mugging of Games host Caesar Flickerman, are infuriating. I went on the gala night, with a very excited, largely invited audience, most of whom had some kind of skin in the game, as it were (producers, agents, friends and family). Even they couldn’t muster much enthusiasm.