Not a dry eye (including mine) was left in the stable at the end of this superb production. Joey the war horse, sold off the Devon farm into the hell of World War One, survives the trenches by the skin of his teeth and with a waggle of his ears is reunited with farmer's son Albert. Joey isn't a real horse. He is just a an artificial puppet horse made of wood and metal and plastic, and he's manipulated by highly visible puppeteers. When he waggles his ears, you can see their hands move the levers. So the fact that this final moment in the play induces a prickling behind the eyes of hardened cynics is a testament to the power of illusion in the theatre. If it's emotionally real, then it's real. If it's a convincing story convincingly told, the audience will fall for it and it will overcome any lack of realism if the aesthetic ground rules are firmly stamped out from the start. There are no photographs of the trenches, just projected sketches by an imagined cavalry officer with a taste for drawing. In the first moments the style of the production is advertised uncompromisingly even before a single horse has appeared. Actor/puppeteers come on and swing around birds on the end of poles to make the illusion of birds in flight. There's also a very convincing farmyard goose, pushed around flapping its wings by an actor. It takes three actors to play a horse -- two partly hidden and one highly visible, moving the head around. After a moment or two all disbelief is suspended because it's so brilliantly executed. 'The back legs aren't moving quite right,' said my wife, who spends several hours a week with horses. That's a narrow specialist view, and for me, Joey was a real horse. I wanted to run on stage and give him a carrot. I was even looking for him at the curtain call.
There's not a great deal left to say about this excellent revival of the National Theatre's 2007 sellout production, except to give plaudits to all those involved: Michael Morpurgo the original writer, Nick Stafford the adapter, Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris the directors, Handspring Puppet Company who made the puppets, Nick Hytner who gave the show the green light, and of course the performers and those responsible for the excellent music and design. It's all fabulously effective. But it's worth analysing some of the lessons that the success of this production can deliver for other shows. Firstly, I want to look at the relationship between children's theatre and adult theatre. For the former, storytelling skills are paramount; the story is an old-fashioned and very simple one: boy meets horse, boy loses horse, boy finds horse again and they live happily ever after. Many new plays for adults seem to lack the basic storytelling skills that Morpurgo brings to the party. No fancy flashbacks, no postmodern narrative trickery, just an effective storyline that packs an emotional punch. Secondly, the play avoids overt moralising and abstract argument. Nothing is idealised, not even the horse's early upbringing in the Devon countryside at the centre of the two fractious halves of the Narracott family. As a result of a family wager Joey, a cross between a working farm horse and a thoroughbred, finds himself being made to plough a field. As the play moves to the battlefields of France, neither the British nor the Germans are demonised. There are no great speeches in this play and the key scenes don't depend on words. At the end the half-blinded Albert crouches on one side of the stage while a vet prepares to shoot Joey on the other, having decided that his leg wounds from being caught in barbed wire are too serious to treat. The words don't really matter; what counts is the few yards of space keeping Albert and Joey apart. Finally they find each other. Is this melodrama? I suppose it is in one sense, but not if the word is used to suggest fake emotion. Here the emotional punch comes as the natural outcome of the story.
Thirdly, I want to draw some comparisons. This play reminded me of the National Theatre of Scotland's Black Watch in its elegant use of sparse props and stage equipment to tell a war story. The last play I saw on the big Olivier stage was Her Naked Skin, which was by comparison constricted by its big metal set. That's a play which could also have benefited from better storytelling skills of the kind that children's authors such as Morpurgo do so well. Another meaningful comparison to be drawn is with the achingly pretentious use of stage techniques used by Katie Mitchell in Waves, based on Virginia Woolf. That seemed hollow to me because the inventive skills being deployed by the actors on stage lacked any real dramatic purpose. The storytelling function of theatre had been lost in a forest of clever devised (how I dislike that word!) technique. In War Horse, it's the opposite. All the ingenuity in creating lifelike horses on stage is applied for a purpose. Yes, you can see the puppetmaster's string-pulling, and there's no secret to how it's done, so it's very Brechtian in the good sense of the word. But it all serves the writer's story. Another piece of ingenious puppet theatre, the spectacular Sultan's Elephant production from Nantes that came to central London a couple of years ago, could also have benefited from an injection of storytelling skills which would have provided it with a strong narrative framework. The elephant was a very good elephant, but it didn't really pack any punch because it didn't have a story to tell. This never occurred to me at the time, but I now realise those Frenchmen should have told the story of Babar watching his mother being shot -- a painful storybook scene that I remember vividly from my childhood.
I LOVE THIS BOOK! I read it very many times, and still cant get enough of it... I am currently in 9th grade, in Cieszanow, Poland.
Posted by: Izzy | September 30, 2008 at 06:33 PM