The last few years have seen some of the most celebrated theatrical blockbusters of the ’00s return to our stages with a whimper. That’s not to say that recent revivals of the likes of Art, God of Carnage or Copenhagen were bad – but they did not become raved-about, years-running theatrical phenomena a second time. Current productions of The Producers and Avenue Q are doing well enough in the West End, but neither embodies the zeitgeist the way they did 20 or so years ago.
So here’s the National Theatre bringing back 2007’s blockbuster War Horse, a show that closed on the West End in 2016 but has lived on via endless tours and a Stephen Spielberg-directed screen adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s source text. Surely its moment in the spotlight was a combination of the novelty of its many, many puppets and Britain’s endless obsession with the First World War? Surely it’s dated?
Actually it turns out War Horse is still incredible.
Number one, the puppets are astonishing. Made by the South African company Handspring, it’s not just that individual puppets are good, but that there are so damn many of them, from horses to birds to a tank. Their warm wooden frames look wonderful, and the standard of the puppetry and puppet direction (originally by Handspring’s Adrian Kohler, now by Matthew Forbes) is second to none. On this watch I was quietly blown away by a scene in which main horse Joey was just munching away on a nosebag in the background while the human characters were having a barney about something else. They just look astonishingly alive. It’s also simply true that there’s been no other puppet-based nearly as ambitious since – the RSC’s My Neighbour Totoro comes closest, but that’s a fantasy world; War Horse is ‘real’. Sometimes groundbreaking work dates rapidly because it’s overtaken by that which it inspires; War Horse remains virtually peerless because how do you top this?
Number two: sure, it’s a reasonably trope-filled story about the First World War, adapted by Nick Stafford from Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 book for preteens. Inspired by Morpurgo’s chance encounter with an elderly ex-cavalryman in a rural pub, the plot revolves around the doomed British cavalry who discovered they were obsolete in the worst way possible during the early weeks of the conflict. It’s sturdy, unfussy storytelling, but this gives it a purity and timelessness – it’s not trying to be overly literary or make a dated allegorical point about the world of 2007. It’s about… war and horses. Morpurgo does a deft job of balancing a degree of whimsy – the story focuses on Devon lad Albert and his special horse friend Joey – with a marked lack of sentimentality when it comes to the horrors of war and bumping off characters.
But the war is also where Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris’ production really comes together. After a gentle, epilogue-like first section that showcases the puppets and shows us Albert and Joey’s relatively idyllic rural childhoods – complicated only by the drunken shenanigans of Albert’s dad – Joey is drafted as a cavalry horse, and a heartbroken Albert eventually follows him into the conflict in the hope of a reunion. The ‘war’ section that takes up most of the play is, at its most intense, astonishing, a roiling living Guernica of nocturnal horror and nightmarish imagery. The puppetry is a lot of it, the unsettling images Handspring's creations throw up: two skeletal horses hauling an artillery gun before their deaths; a horrified Joey coming face to face with the insanity that is a full-blown tank. But to say this is a purely puppet triumph is selling the wider creative team short, from the lighting (originally Paule Constable, here Rob Casey) – which veers from perfectly naturalistic to stark and unearthly – to the unsettling cartoon-like projections of scarred and dying soldiers (by 59 Productions after designs by Rae Smith). NB there are various changes in creative personnel, with Morris redirecting solo, but it’s essentially the same show as before.
The horror of armed conflict isn’t exactly under-explored in art, but like Picasso’s great painting, it’s the juxtaposition of horrified animals with the artificial horror of twentieth-century warfare that makes War Horse so potent.
Is it a cop out for the NT to bring this most blockbustery of its old blockbusters back? Despite obviously being expensive to stage – it has a gargantuan cast – a new run of War Horse is presumably money in the bank. But the years haven’t touched it, and short of a radical rethink of our attitude to WW1 or, er, puppets, it’s hard to imagine why it would ever age.
I took my 11-year-old, who wasn’t even born last time I saw it, and was blown away Obviously the NT should forever be searching for whatever the new War Horse might be. But it would be a crime to put Joey and co out to pasture when they still have so much to give.
