Pig Heart Boy review

Before you even set foot in the auditorium, your ears are assailed by the loud, steady thud of an amplified beating heart. That’s the first striking feature to hit you in Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu’s energising production of Malorie Blackman’s issue-packed 1997 tale of genetic engineering and organ transplantation – aimed, ambitiously, at children aged nine to 13 and adapted by acclaimed playwright Winsome Pinnock. Mononymous XANA’s bleeping, whirring sound design and drum and bass-inflected compositions continue to impress throughout the show, but our next wow-inducing encounter is with designer Paul Wills’ set: a late 20th-century Frankenstein’s laboratory of static-fizzing screens, booming speaker diaphragms and pulsing LED wires snaking like monstrous blood vessels across the stage – all superbly enhanced by wittily retro, 1990s video design from Jack Baxter and richly colourful lighting from Andrew Exeter. The spectacle demands the electric charge of crack acting to spring to life – and Fynn-Aiduenu’s versatile cast start on a high note, then gently ramp the intensity, right up until the show’s heart-stopping denouement.

Immanuel Yeboah brings both sensitivity and a soulful charisma to the role of Cameron, a bright, popular 13-year-old schoolboy with a love of swimming, who yearns to compete with his friends at Daredevil Dive. Perhaps his obsession with this underwater breath-holding contest is because he can’t participate: a viral infection when younger has left him in need of a heart transplant and, as he awaits a suitable donor, he cannot attempt anything remotely strenuous. Then a medical breakthrough provides the possibility of trialling the modified heart of a pig. However, Cameron recognises that the animal – named Trudy – has rights, too, and he faces his first real dilemma in Blackman’s thought-provoking story.

It’s in moments such as this that Pinnock’s adaptation excels, providing Cameron with a theatrically surreal inner dream life: in the book he meets Trudy and ponders what the animal might think and feel; in this stage version, Cameron actually gets to converse with Trudy – hilariously enacted by Chia Phoenix as a “bougie” Miss Piggy-alike, trussed up in the latest street fashions, with no notion of her eventual fate.

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