To: puptcrit-AT-puptcrit.org
From: "Bruce K. Chesse" <brucec-AT-chesseartsltd.com>
Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2008 06:20:17 -0700
Subject: [Puptcrit] WAR HORSE


WAR HORSE -AT- THE NATIONAL

=91the uber-marionette will not compete with Life---but will rather go  
beyond it. It=92s ideal will not be the flesh and blood but rather the  
body in Trance--it will aim to clothe itself with a death-like Beauty  
while exhaling a living spirit=94

						                             Gordon Craig

	=93War Horse=94 at the National=92s Olivier Theatre gives us full size  
horse puppets that are a personification of Gordon Craig=92s theory of  
the =93Ubermarionette=94. This is the first time in my career that I have  
seen puppets become characters in a play, in their own right, apart  
from being just glorified props, set pieces or intellectual  
metaphors. They are an integral part of the play structure who at  
times propel the action and convey their concern and point of view  
without words.  It is:

=93The story of a young man and his faithful four legged companion  
takes us on a journey through poverty, loneliness and war.=94
														Katie Spain

Taken from Michael Morpurgo's much-loved novel of the same name the  
play is presented in a forthright style that tells a simple story  
without complicated settings or overblown sentimentality. It=92s use of  
simple folk tunes heightens the drama again projecting a  
sentimentality that is not cloying but adds to a simplicity of feeling.

An anti-war play that does not preach to you but creates a visual  
picture that allows the audience to come to their own conclusions by  
illustrating the incongruities of war. Scenes on the battlefield are  
realized on a cloud like formation that hangs high overhead.  
Expressionistic moving shadows are projected on them creating the  
illusion and moving you from scene to scene. scene. Other puppets are  
brought into play at various times, particularly a protective goose  
with flapping wings who finds it own moment on stage to the delight  
of the audience. My only concern was not enough program credit was  
given to the South African =93Hand Spring Puppet Company whose work I  
saw in London in 85=92. I purchased the National program which sadly  
contained very little information as to the company. One of it=92s  
founders Basil Jones is a part of the relatively unknown cast  and  
the puppetering is phenomenal.  I am assuming they were all trained  
by Basil and belies the fact that actors cannot be good puppeteers.  
Go to their website. Goggle Handspring puppet Company for more  
details. I have purposely not given you a detail plot synopsis. The  
attached review by Sarah Perry does that better than I could. This is  
Theater at it=92s best and puppetry at it=92s finest. Headed by a cast of  
actors I was unfamiliar with it was truly an ensemble work.  It plays  
through January 2009 at the National.


War Horse Review

cast list

Jamie Ballard			Rachel Leonard
Alice Barclay			Tim Lewis
Jason Barnett			Tommy Luther
Finn Caldwell			Emily Mytton
Paul Chequer			Toby Olie
Thomas Goodridge		Toby Sedgwick
Thusitha Jayasundera		Ashley Taylor-Rhys
Gareth Kennerley		Luke Treadaway
Alan Williams

directed by Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris
		
I'll admit I am prone to falling madly in love with this book, that  
song, or the other play. I have a tendency to thrust slender novels  
at my friends and declare them the latest Mrs Dalloway =96 to cry  
Woolf, if you will.

But it is entirely without exaggeration I tell you that War Horse,  
the National Theatre's new production of Michael Morpurgo's much- 
loved novel, is simply the most beautiful, compelling, absorbing and  
heart-breaking piece of theatre I have ever seen. If we can judge a  
play by its effect on the audience =96 and I don't see why we shouldn't  
=96 War Horse must be garlanded with praise. At its conclusion the  
audience, which had done a pretty poor job of restraining itself  
throughout the final half-hour, erupted into tearful applause, and  
stumbled into the lobby with bruised palms and promises to return the  
following night.

The play opens in Devon in 1913, where young Albert's feckless father  
has bought a foal at auction. Begging to be allowed to keep the  
horse, Albert develops a bond with the animal, spending long summer  
days as its companion, and naming him Joey. At the outbreak of war  
Albert's father sells Joey into the cavalry, and breaks his son's  
heart; unable to bear the thought of his friend facing the  
battlefields alone, he lies about his age, and enlists.

The tale is as much a sad stern caution on war as it is the story of  
a horse and his boy. Albert is first a frightened youth, then a cocky  
lance-corporal with a defiant cigarette, and finally a wounded and  
wretched child again. As with all great and terrible things, the  
terror of war is incomprehensible unless we can come down to some  
small detail, and it is the smallest things =96 young boys told to left  
their buttons unpolished so they don't draw fire, a trembling horse  
caught on barbed wire =96 that are most piteous.

There is much to admire in the play's staging =96 the use of poignant  
folk songs ringing over the battle-fields, the utter shock of a tank  
rearing up against the frightened horses =96 but the puppetry makes the  
production. The horses are life-sized models of cloth and paper laid  
over wooden frames, articulated by three actors always visible and  
never intrusive. The range and subtlety of the movements they draw  
from them is astonishing: Joey as a foal is leggy, capricious, and a  
little afraid; as a hunter he's broad-flanked and dignified, which  
makes his terror in battle all the more distressing to see. At one  
point a horse doomed to pull cannon dies of exhaustion; its body is  
ghostly pale and made of tattered fragments, and when it dies the  
actors roll out from its belly like a departing spirit. A puppet of a  
small girl is less successful, and indeed has an eerie sort of face  
more appropriate to a horror film than a play, but it is a small  
complaint.

I have never known an audience be so affected. When a reluctant army  
surgeon raises his pistol to the trembling forehead of a wounded  
horse, and the grim soldiers nearby give a final salute, I heard all  
around me people begging aloud for its life. The conclusion probably  
comes perilously close to sentimentality, but who cares: if there  
cannot be unashamed sentiment where there is a tale of loyalty and  
broken youth, then where can there be?

Luke Treadaway as Albert is a revelation; he is so measured and  
natural a presence throughout that his distress in the final scene is  
almost impossible to watch. The adult cast members are at times a  
little too declamatory in their approach, as if to make the plot  
inescapably easy to grasp, but then one remembers it's a play for  
children, and they are forgiven. Angus Wright is particularly good as  
a tormented German officer who finds Joey: his appearance at the  
beginning of the second half propels the action to its conclusion.
Other reviewers have carped about the improbabilities of the play's  
plot, but good heavens: presumably they have several times accepted  
that a court-full of learned men truly believed Portia to be a young  
man of unusually high voice and acute legal understanding, or that  
Lucy pushed her way through a cluster of fur coats and came across  
that lamp-post glowing in that snowy wood. It will take you no more  
than five minutes to suspend your disbelief, and see not a wooden  
cloth-covered frame but a bay hunter with a shy boy riding on its back.

Go, and take your children, if you have them (youngsters of much less  
than twelve were there, shocked but enraptured): there can be no  
better lesson on the value of loyalty, and the infuriating, shameful,  
pointless pity of war.
- Sarah Perry
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