I had the privilege of seeing the National Theatre’s dramatisation of War Horse, based on the Michael Morpurgo novel of the same name. The play charts one boy’s journey to be reunited with his horse, which his father sold at the start of the war, and sees him enlisting in the army in order to try to make this desire a reality.

Not having read the novel prior to seeing the production, all that I knew with certainty was that the production was going to include puppets. However, the puppets rested uneasily with me when they initially appeared, in the form of a rather small “pony” controlled by three actors. I found my attention was drawn more to the actors and their movements, than to the pony. In fact, as my mind wandered, I even began to wonder if the actors would be trampled to death by their own puppet! It was only when the actors combined their voices as one to create the heart wrenching, primal scream of the pony being tamed into a human world that I began to see the puppet more as a character, and less as a man made construction. However, it wasn’t until the pony faded into the distance and a full sized equine reared up through the mist, containing two men within the chasms of its body, that I was fully able to suspend my disbelief and appreciate the ingenuity of the puppet makers.

The two horses were nothing short of works of art, each being uniquely characterised by the actors manipulating them and, in my opinion, these horses were the real protagonists of the production. The realisation that every horse utterance is, in fact, manifested by the human actors on stage, helps to complete the personification of the horse’s emotions that the actor controlling the head, with his arched back, empathetic facial expressions and horse like gait embodies. A mere twitch of an ear, a flick of the tail, or a neigh conveys so much more than a hundred human words ever could, and the fact that the human characters on stage actually rode these horses demonstrated the use of puppetry at its very best.

The comic element of the show came through moments such as the “friendly” goose puppet continually trying to enter the house of its owners; puppetry which again worked effectively and it was, in fact, the goose which got the last bow of the night. The scavenging birds, pecking at the eyes of the fallen horses on the battle fields were strangely both haunting and humbling.

However, not all of the puppetry added to the production and some, quite simply, detracted from the overall feel of the performance. The two main horses were, at times, joined on stage by “half horse” puppets, controlled by just one actor and representing just the upper sections of the horse. This decision was presumably made due to both costing and casting limitations, but gave a half hearted feel to the scenes which they were contained in. Similarly, two child puppets, one of which did actually speak through the voice of her puppeteer, left you wondering why they couldn’t have simply employed a real child to act in the role. The somewhat Brechtian use of shadow puppets, projected against various backdrops, was too child like and lacked the sophistication that the puppet makers had already shown themselves capable of.

Moving away from the puppets, the set was used effectively throughout the production. A strip of white canvas was displayed against a black cyclorama and was used to project black and white pencil drawings to represent the various locations of the script. The projection of red poppies, spreading out into pools of blood at the conclusion of a major battle sequence, resonated through the audience as it provided the only colour and was reminiscent of the girl in the red coat used in Schindler’s List.

It could be said that the emotive music which filled the theatre throughout the performance is, again, more often associated with a film score than with the theatre. It swept the audience along as the music swelled and subsided in harmony with our emotions.

My main criticism of the production would be the classic Hollywood narrative paradigm style ending which the piece adopts. In the final scenes, the boy is rather predictably reunited with his horse, and saves it from the brink of death when it had be destined to be put down in the name of humanity. Whilst this ending rests more easily with the children in the audience, the whole concept seems implausible. I feel that it would have been far more fitting for the horse to be put down. In this way, the boy could echo the horse’s primal scream of earlier scenes as he realises that his long awaited reunion comes just seconds too late.

As the final notes of the music faded and the characters departed to “live happily ever after,” the stage was once more plunged into darkness, with only the jagged white strip of canvas visible through the blackness. It’s at this point that you realise that what you have just witnessed is just one tiny strip, torn from a page in History and that there is still so much more, and so many more stories, that are hidden, waiting to be discovered.

http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/warhorse

2007-11-27