Lolita Chakrabarti’s stage adaptation of Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi is enjoying immense critical and commercial success, triumphing at the 2022 Olivier Awards with five wins and nine nominations. Its success is largely because of its innovative use of puppetry, pushing the art form into new boundaries.
Romina Hytten is part of the tremendous team of puppeteers who have brought the iconic Royal Bengal tiger known as Richard Parker to life on stage. After training and appearing in many productions for the Chichester Festival Youth Theatre, she developed a strong passion for physical theatre where she got to work with some of the most prominent figures in the industry such as Toby Olié and Finn Caldwell. Her career is reaching new heights thanks to her role as ‘Tiger Heart’ in Life of Pi which won her an Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actor.
The Indiependent spoke to her about her career roots and the creative process behind operating the tiger.
The Indiependent: Life of Pi is a story of physical, mental and spiritual survival with a lot of raw emotion exposed, how easy is this to translate through puppetry? What is your process for emoting through movement?
Romina Hytten: It’s a really beautiful journey that we take the audience on and a lot of it is stretching the audience’s imagination I think. Through movement we do that and through puppetry as well.
I think there’s something really meditative about being a puppeteer in the fact that we sort of walk on the stage but we’re just saying “don’t look at me, look at this.”
We work really as a team of puppeteers to create the tiger for example. There’s three of us that puppeteer the tiger and we all bring it to life. It is really spiritual in the fact that we really have to stretch all of our senses to all communicate together without speaking to each other. Things might go wrong and we all might have to improvise together to go, “oh we’re going to go this way” if something has fallen out of the boat and we have to go and chase it because that’s what the tiger would do in that moment. We all kind of react together.
It is just constantly moving and I think the movement in the whole of the piece is always flowing…and that really brings the whole audience on this journey together.
How did you get into Physical Theatre? Was it an early ambition or something you discovered later?
My journey to where I am today is maybe a bit unique. I have always loved theatre, and from a young age I’ve always wanted to be an actor and loved performing. I joined a youth theatre in Chichester called the Chichester Festival Youth Theatre and that was an amazing experience. I was a member from the age of 11 to 19 and that kind of became my training.
The plan was always to go to drama school. But we did professional shows with the youth theatre every Christmas and we were working with loads of professionals. That’s where I first introduced to puppetry with the amazing Toby Olié and Finn Caldwell, Finn being the movement and puppetry director of Life of Pi. That’s where I met them and was introduced to puppetry.
I completely caught the bug and fell in love with it. We did a show called Running Wild, which was based on a book by Michael Morpurgo with big puppets of live sized elephants and orangutans which was amazing. Then it got transferred to Regents Park Open Air Theatre and they took me and Fred Davis, who is also in Life of Pi and was also in the youth theatre. They plucked us out of the youth theatre to work professionally with them in Regents Park.
Puppetry was quite a niche group of people and everyone knows everyone and recommends each other and stuff so that kind of kick-started my career and Fred’s too and we both just sort of carried on working. It was amazing.
I kind of kept growing and building my skillset and learning from greats. Now I’m here in the West End working in Life of Pi. So yeah that’s kind of my journey. I have huge gratitude to the Youth Theatre because it was an amazing experience. I learned so much there and they gave me a huge kick-start in my career.
What is your favourite aspect of playing the Tiger in Life of Pi?
I love being able to play this amazing role because when do you get to play a tiger ever? It’s just a great, fierce and beautiful beast to play and I especially love being the heart of it because you really feel like you are the belly of the beast.
It’s also really peaceful to work as that team. There’s seven of us, sometimes eight and we all rotate because it’s very physical. We couldn’t physically do eight shows a week as the tiger so we all rotate so there’s lots of different teams so we’re not always with the same three people on a tiger so sometimes it all changes.
One of my favourite things is there’s so many different versions of Richard Parker because every puppeteer on each part of it brings a new energy or a new bit of character. That is so exciting to find the new thoughts of that tiger that night when working with new puppeteers and I always love it.
That’s something that I love from puppetry is that it’s such a team effort so you can’t have too much ego with it. I’m always learning and we’re always stealing from each other. So I’ll watch the other tiger team when I’m not the tiger that night and I’ll go “that looked amazing when she dipped her paw in the water and then shook it off” then I’ll do that the next night. We’re always stealing from each other which is great.
What advice would you give to someone trying to break in to the world of Physical Theatre – where does one start with that career choice?
My advice, which is what I guess I followed, would be to always say yes to every kind of opportunity that’s given to you. Just be open and say yes to all experiences because that’s what I did and that’s how I fell into the world of puppetry and fell in love with it.
It wasn’t a path I was looking for but then I had all these opportunities just fell into me by always saying yes and being positive and lovely to everyone you work with and meet. This world is so much about recommendations and one thing will lead onto another so that’s definitely really good advice.
All this advice was advice that I was given as well so it’s nice to just pass it on. Be open to learning from everyone that you work with. It is quite a humbling thing, I’m always learning and I will constantly learn on every job from every single person I work with, no matter their experience. If they’re older than me, younger than me I always think it’s important to learn from everyone which is really nice.
With a more direct link to puppetry, there are lots of workshops and courses. There’s an amazing school called ‘The Curious School of Puppetry’ which is sort-of like a three months intensive and I think the last year was in Edinburgh run by brilliant teachers, and lots of great puppeteers will teach sections of the course. And I know a lot of people that went to East 15 to do their physical theatre’s course, a lot of people that I work with did that course, I know that was really good. Just try your best to explore it as best you can would be my advice.
Words by Katie Heyes
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