Finn Caldwell is studying four performers perched in the back of a boat. Together, they are manipulating an enormous puppet, the Royal Bengal tiger known as Richard Parker in Life of Pi, Yann Martel’s Booker prize-winning novel, now brought to the stage in a mesmerising production by Max Webster. “Has anyone got a spare hand for a foot?” he asks. There isn’t an easy answer. One of them is holding the creature’s spine. One is swishing its tail and handling its hind legs. A third is moving the animal’s front paws and a fourth – Habib Nasib Nader, the tiger’s voice – is keeping the head high and the jaw moving. To coordinate them is a strategic balancing act. Every muscle needs a hand to move it. They are working on the scene where Pi, shipwrecked and adrift between south-east India and Mexico, discovers the ravenous tiger can speak. From the other end of the life raft, the animal reels off a sumptuous litany of dishes: “Boeuf bourguignon, tripe and calf brains in a brown butter jus, roast suckling pig…” With each dish comes a gesture. With each gesture, a finely honed ballet of joints and limbs. Caldwell takes the performers through the speech, phrase by phrase, beat by beat, with exacting detail. “When you say, ‘Stay up,’ are you talking to me specifically?” asks Nader. “No, the puppet,” says Caldwell. You can understand the confusion. They are four people playing one character and, as movement director, he must make them breathe as one. “When you operate in a team, you get to the point where you think everybody else’s ideas are better,” Caldwell says. “You think everyone else is doing it because, somehow, it’s happening between you.” He adds: “One of the things that feels live about the animal is the audience don’t know what it’s going to do – and the actors don’t know either. Because there are at least three people operating the tiger, the choreography is going to be delivered slightly differently every night. There is this frisson of uncertainty and that makes it very live.” Even here, in this London rehearsal room without lights or costumes, it is impossible to take your eyes off Richard Parker. Designed by Caldwell and Nick Barnes, the tiger is a floating jigsaw of weather-worn joints in sun-blushed orange. He is not real yet he seems to breathe. “You know it’s some wood, plastic and people, but you invest in it and it happens in your head,” says Caroline Bowman, associate puppet designer, who sculpted most of the show’s many animal heads. “The more you commit to it, the more beautiful it is.” It is a leap of imagination that pays emotional dividends for the audience. “People feel they’ve brought it to life, so they’re responsible for it,” says Barnes. “When it hurts, you feel it. When it has joy, you feel it too.” He points to the independent movement of each of the tiger’s joints, secured by bungee rope to the spine, making it elastic and responsive. “As it rises, you can see one piece going against another,” he says. “You can really identify the movement. If this was all one thing, half of that movement would be lost. You wouldn’t get the language of the muscle.” Caldwell, who worked with Handspring puppet company on War Horse and partnered with Barnes on The Lorax and Angels in America, describes cats as “stretchy accordions”. By basing the puppets on real animal anatomy, they have built that feline flexibility into Richard Parker: “When it jumps it elongates and then it can really compress.” It took a team of eight to build the puppets and a week for the puppeteers to get used to them. The project could have gone badly wrong. On its voyage to the stage, a hallucinatory tale of 227 days at sea could easily have drifted off course. “I had no idea how to do it,” says designer Tim Hatley. “And that’s what appealed.” But their efforts have already paid off. On its premiere two years ago at the Crucible in Sheffield, Life of Pi raked in the five-star reviews. Whether it was Hiran Abeysekera’s light-footed performance in the lead role, Lolita Chakrabarti’s theatrically savvy adaptation or Hatley’s magically porous set, everything clicked into place. Had it not been for the pandemic, its West End transfer to Wyndham’s theatre, where they’ve reconfigured the stage to thrust into the stalls, would have come much sooner. “We got standing ovations even from our roughest preview,” says Caldwell. “By the fifth time that happened, I thought, regardless of how much work is in front of me, the response from the audience is different from anything I’d seen before.” For director Max Webster, the puppets do two things. First, they appeal to the same childhood instinct that made us turn lollipop sticks into people and bananas into telephones. Second, they connect directly to a key theme in Martel’s book. “When theatre becomes hallucinatorily wonderful, it is because you’ve got a group of people collectively imagining a thing, which creates an act of imagination in the audience,” he says. “That is also what the Pi story is about. Pi tells two stories: a fantastical story, a story with animals, which is the story with puppets – and a much more scientific story, which is the brutal realism. Pi asks us which story we prefer. The meaning of the story is in the imagination of the puppetry.” Life of Pi is at Wyndham’s theatre, London, from 15 November