Review: Pig Heart Boy at the Liverpool Playhouse ****

Life isn’t always easy – and great children’s stories don’t shy away from covering sensitive issues and asking difficult questions.

Malorie Blackman’s Pig Heart Boy, a tale about a teenager who undergoes a contentious heart transplant, certainly falls into this category. And it’s evidently struck a chord, finding its way on to plenty of recommended reading lists for young people since its publication in 1997.

Hence the school-age groups packing the stalls for Winsome Pinnock’s lively stage adaptation of the novel which is visiting Liverpool Playhouse this week as part of a national tour.

Thirteen-year-old Cameron (Immanuel Yeboah) longs to take part in the daring games of his schoolmates, but with a serious heart condition – caused by a viral infection acquired as a youngster – he has to sit on the sidelines and watch instead.

With his heath failing, when he’s offered the chance of a new heart in a pioneering and experimental transplant programme, he has a big decision to make. Especially as the organ comes – no surprise here given the title of the story – not from another human but from a (genetically-modified) pig.

Called Trudy.

Will the transplant be a success and allow Cameron to plan his future? And what of the wider issues which surround breeding animals to act as organ donors?

Under director Tristan Fynn-Aiduenu and with invigorating performances from its cast, Pinnock’s adaptation proves a clever and engaging telling of Blackman’s story and one which, in general, manages to strike a good balance between energetic comedy and the plot’s emotionally resonant, and ethically thought-provoking, moments.

Above: Cameron (Immanuel Yeboah) and Dr Bryce (Tre Medley). Top: Yeboah and the cast of Pig Heart Boy. Photos by Ali Wright.

Yebaoh delivers a magnetic central performance as the teenager who has some big decisions to make, breaking the fourth wall to take his young audience on the rollercoaster ride with him as he meets his porcine donor and finds himself under the care of Tre Medley’s jittery, jive-talking Dr Bryce.

Meanwhile it’s not just what happens on stage which grabs the attention – but the staging itself.

Designer Paul Wills’ set is a masterclass in vivid visual storytelling, a tangle of arterial neon tube lights radiating from a central disc (heart), which change colour depending on the plot and the mood.

It has something of the feel of Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time about it and adds to the production’s poetic sense of heightened reality/unreality.

There’s also good wider lighting design from Andrew Exeter, and a mesmeric and unsettling rumbling beat at the heart of XANA’s sound design.

Ideas of family, friendship, loyalty, betrayal, resilience, identity and ethics come together in a piece of imaginative storytelling which will appeal not just to young people but to audiences of all ages.