In an age of streaming, the Children’s Theatre Partnership is still flying the flag for live theatre. They put on long regional tours of big cast shows with high production values. Last year’s show, The Boy At The Back Of The Class, was one of my highlights of 2024, and Pig Heart Boy is this year’s tour.
Cameron is thirteen years old. He has a heart condition, and he’s been given a year to live. There are no donor organs available, but a doctor offers him an experimental animal donor operation with no guarantee of success. What would you do?
Malorie Blackman’s 1997 novel has an intriguing premise, and she tells a gripping story which examines some serious moral issues. Winsome Pinnock’s stage adaptation tells the same story, with the same first person narrative structure, and adds a few theatrical flourishes of her own.
This is a show of two halves. In the first half, Cameron’s personal drama takes second place to some eye-catching stage effects and a succession of larger-than-life characters. Cameron’s fellow students are a collection of stock types: the school bully, the bookish one, the prettiest girl in the school, his best friend, that sort of thing.
The heart surgeon, Dr. Bryce, makes a rock star entrance through the audience in a white suit and a Southern American, TV evangelist accent which screams ‘charlatan’. In fact he’s not, he is a dedicated doctor who does everything he can to save Cameron’s life. Similarly, at the hospital, there is a doctor called Dr. Ehrlich who speaks in a mad scientist Cherman eccent, presumably because she has a foreign-sounding name, but she’s actually a compassionate ally to Cameron.
In the novel, when Cameron meets his donor pig, Trudy, it prompts him to consider the moral relativism of the value we place on human over animal life and whether it is any different from anti-Semitism and slavery. Here, Trudy is blinged out in Nicki Minaj-style shades and a gold and pink puffer jacket.
Blackman’s novel takes young people and their concerns seriously. It is full of decent people wrestling with difficult moral problems and trying to do the right thing, so the over-simplification in Pinnock’s play, and the brittle, satirical tone of Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu’s production, is at odds with their hugely popular source material.
The play changes gear after the interval. Cameron’s operation is a success, but someone has leaked the story to the press and now he’s front page news. Then the first transplant starts to fail, and Cameron has to decide whether to go for another one. In theory, this is where the moral dilemmas Blackman set up in the first half should take centre stage, but reducing the characters to two-dimensional stereotypes undermines the emotional payoff, and it’s all a bit, well, heartless.
Pig Heart Boy isn’t really about heart surgery; it’s about having the courage to live your life to the full. Cameron is a link in the chain between his elderly Nan and his, as yet unborn, sibling, Alex. His life is unfair, and he has to make impossible choices with no way of knowing if he is doing the right thing, but that's how it is, so listen to the people who love you, feel the fear and do it anyway. The moral lesson is still there in this production, it just loses some of its emotional weight and it got a muted reaction from the Wednesday morning schools audience with whom I watched it.
The cast is excellent, though, and the production values are terrific. Immanuel Yeboah does most of the narrative heavy lifting as Cameron, but the remaining cast switch smoothly between the other roles, and Paul Wills’s set, Andrew Exeter’s lighting, XANA’s sound design and D K Fashola’s choreography fill the main house stage. On tour until June 2025.