The Hunger Games: On Stage review: a curiously uninvolving exercise in visual dazzle

Euan Garrett (Peeta Mellark), Mia Carragher (Katniss Everdeen) - (Johan Persson)

First the good news: Mia Carragher makes an arresting stage debut as Katniss Everdeen in this spectacular adaptation of the first book in Suzanne Collins’s cult young adult series, about teenage gladiatorial combat in a post-apocalyptic dictatorship. I was never bored and often breathless as the huge, mostly young cast ran, jumped, fought and screamed around the lofty and technologically sophisticated in-the-round arena of the new Troubadour Theatre. Show and venue have been conjured into being for a combined cost of £26m and you can see where the money’s gone.

You can also tell there’s a ‘but’ coming… The whole extravaganza, involving heart-in-mouth aerial work, gouts of flame and nifty visual effects, feels more like a circus-style parade of tricks than an involving theatrical narrative. Adapter Conor McPherson, usually the subtlest of playwrights, has produced a script that’s both flat and thin. And while the Troubadour’s auditorium is terrific its public areas are soulless, its location amid the arid towers of Canary Wharf aptly but offputtingly dystopian.