Hunger Games dazzles but ultimately misses the target

For all its bells, bangs and whistles, this latest expansion of the dystopian franchise feels slight

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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.