The Olivier may have been built to stage Shakespeare and Brecht, but it has really come into its own with a new generation of theatremakers who imaginatively enhance the text with powerful imagery that fills the space without resorting to the high-tech wizardry of a West End musical. Nowhere is this more true than in Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris’ production of Michael Morpurgo’s popular and moving book about Joey, the part-thoroughbred horse, that is torn away from his young owner Albert (Luke Treadaway) and sent off to France, like so many others, to take part in World War I.
The book is told from the point of view of Joey but inevitably Nick Stafford’s adaptation – occasionally more carthorse than racehorse – takes an objective view. The horses (thank god) don’t speak but they are so imaginatively created by South African company Handspring and so eloquently manipulated by the puppeteers that they effortlessly hold the stage. The adult Joey makes a spectacular entrance – the envy of any diva – rearing up at the back of the stage as its younger, coltish self disappears. A dead horse lying on the ground is reminiscent of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, a carrion crow picks at the eye of another, while the image of two skeletal, broken backed nags pulling a machine gun is likely to haunt anyone’s dreams. Elliott and Morris’ vision of the noise and smoke of war is brilliantly enhanced by Paule Constable’s blinding lights and Rae Smith’s set, a white scar of a backdrop on which her animated drawings amplify the action below.
It says much for the integrity of the directors that they don’t squeeze every teary drop out of the moving resolution – for the sake of clarity they could even afford to expand the final half hour. But what a remarkable achievement to take a children’s book and transform it into an astonishing piece of theatre that is sometimes harrowing but also a celebration of the relationship between man and his four-legged friend.
I actually wept while watching War Horse. But what struck me was that in ‘War Horse’, Joey (the horse 'narrator') was given a happy ending by being repatriated to England at the end of the war.
But the reality couldn’t have been more different for tens of thousands of other ‘Joey’s’. At the end of World War One, the majority were sold into a life of drudgery because the British Government couldn’t afford to bring them home. Many died soon after – broken by their war efforts and subsequent forced labour.
In 1930s, English horse-lover, Mrs Dorothy Brooke, asked the British public to help save the remaining war horses still in Cairo. Following a newspaper appeal, donations poured in and Mrs Brooke humanely put to sleep 5,000 of these wretched creatures.
But her legacy – and the legacy of horses like Joey – lives on. Her fund has since become an international equine lifesaving charity called the Brooke giving relief to hundreds of thousands of working horses worldwide, many of which have been caught in the crossfire of war.
In 1918, we had to stand by while tens of thousands of cavalry horses were left to their fate at the end of the war, but at least today we can help our modern-day Joey's.
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I actually wept while watching War Horse. But what struck me was that in ‘War Horse’, Joey (the horse 'narrator') was given a happy ending by being repatriated to England at the end of the war.
But the reality couldn’t have been more different for tens of thousands of other ‘Joey’s’. At the end of World War One, the majority were sold into a life of drudgery because the British Government couldn’t afford to bring them home. Many died soon after – broken by their war efforts and subsequent forced labour.
In 1930s, English horse-lover, Mrs Dorothy Brooke, asked the British public to help save the remaining war horses still in Cairo. Following a newspaper appeal, donations poured in and Mrs Brooke humanely put to sleep 5,000 of these wretched creatures.
But her legacy – and the legacy of horses like Joey – lives on. Her fund has since become an international equine lifesaving charity called the Brooke giving relief to hundreds of thousands of working horses worldwide, many of which have been caught in the crossfire of war.
In 1918, we had to stand by while tens of thousands of cavalry horses were left to their fate at the end of the war, but at least today we can help our modern-day Joey's.