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Plywood horse puppets are stars in this gruelling wartime tragedy
WAR HORSE
New London Theatre
BEST actor awards don’t go to puppets or puppeteers, but there are occasions – as evidenced by the National’s transferred adaptation of the Michael Morpurgo novel War Horse – when perhaps they should.
If that sounds like a snipe at the acting in Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris’s guts and gunpowder production, it is not intended to be.
The human performances, though a mite broad in places, are by and large fine. But they are cast into shade by the stunning plywood horses, each expertly manipulated by three members of South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company.
With the spectre of the First World War looming over bucolic Devon, young farmhand Albert Narracot (Kit Harrington) is separated from his beloved steed, Joey.
Requisitioned by the British Army, Joey is taken into the thick of battle; Albert, to the consternation of his parents, plunges into the fray after him.
Harrington’s Albert, all clotted cream and no scones, represents the saccharine side of War Horse, a family show that likes to trumpet the fact every now and then.
The war scenes, by contrast, are gruelling and visceral; and told mainly from the animals’ perspective. The conceit is poignantly drawn in the tracing paper skeletons of cavalry horses torn apart by machine-gun fire and barbed wire, picked at by carrion marionettes.
The Great War marks a paradigm shift in the nature of human conflicts: all these fine steers count for nothing in the face of tanks and bombs.
Their mute destruction in catastrophic charges is as tragic as it is inevitable. No human character in the play comes close to affecting us on that scale.
Take that as you will, War Horse is class act: Rae Smith’s award-winning set – a torn strip of paper hanging over a bare stage – is brilliant in its simplicity, displaying different pencil sketches to suit the action; the direction and choreography is staggeringly assured; and the two hours-plus running time contains some of the most sublime moments in theatre you are likely to see this year.
Until September 26 |
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