Miriam Buether and Troubadour, designing a purpose-built theatre for ‘The Hunger Games: On Stage’

For stage designer Miriam Buether, creating the set for ‘The Hunger Games: On Stage’ at Canary Wharf Theatre was both exciting and daunting. “Creating The Hunger Games is a brilliant, brilliant challenge, and also very daunting, because it has such a huge following,” she admits. 

“When we heard that there would be a purpose-built theatre for the show, it was extremely exciting. You know, to be there from the beginning and work with the architects and the engineers, and have input into the build.” 

Even the empty theatre presented challenges. “The theatre looked like an aircraft hanger without anything in it. And that made us quite nervous, because, you know, in theatre, it’s all about the relationship between an audience and the performer. You need to connect and just being in those spaces, I thought, gosh, that’s going to be tricky. But it could be a great challenge too, you know, especially for this play and designing an arena space.” 

Miriam and her team started building models to understand the space. “We started making models in my studio. And they were quite architectural models to help us get a grasp of what the space actually was.” 

Research and planning were key. “We did a lot of research for every location and created these big mood boards. For The Capitol, I looked at brutalist architecture and futuristic architects like Zaha Hadid. And for District 12 we looked at small coal mining towns. And we created a score map, where we plotted through the whole play to work out how we could create a really exciting set.” 

“Theatre was designed specifically for The Hunger Games story. We put the audience in the round, so they’re in on the action.” 

“The Hunger Games seats 1,200 audience members in the round. To design the set, we created the biggest model we’ve ever made.” 

Miriam’s work highlights the creativity thriving in Canary Wharf, it’s a place where bold ideas in arts and culture can come to life.  

‘The Hunger Games: On Stage’ is now open at Troubadour Canary Wharf Theatre | Canary Wharf Theatre