The Hunger Games On Stage

The Hunger Games: On Stage puts Katniss Everdeen's fight for survival in front of a live audience, in the round, with the arena built around the crowd. A child's name is drawn for a televised fight to the death, her older sister volunteers to take her place, and from that moment the machinery of the spectacle takes over.

Katniss is sent to compete against twenty-three other tributes, coached by a drunk former winner, dressed by stylists and sold to sponsors before she is allowed to fight anyone. The adaptation keeps the novel's central discomfort intact: the audience watching her is also the audience she has to charm in order to stay alive. Alliances form, the cameras never stop, and survival becomes a performance.

Conor McPherson wrote the play, working from Suzanne Collins's novel, and it was first staged in 2025 in a theatre built in the round specifically for it. The seating is arranged as districts, the stage rises and falls on lifts, and performers arrive from above and below rather than from the wings.

This is a spectacle-led production: pyrotechnics, hydraulics and large-scale effects carry the arena sequences, and the design does a great deal of the storytelling. The story's questions — about televised cruelty, complicity, and who profits from an audience — sit uneasily against that scale, which is arguably the point of staging it this way.

It suits audiences who know the story and want to see it played out at size. It works best live, because being seated inside the arena rather than in front of it is the entire idea.