One million horses were taken to France from Britain during World War One and only 62,000 came back. Now the ungrateful swine won’t even eat our cows!
It is the lack of precisely this sort of tub thumping jingoism that makes Nick Stafford’s adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s novel War Horse at the National Theatre so compelling.
In one sentence: War Horse is a story about the Great War of 1914 – 1918 from the point of view of Joey, a farm horse from Devon, who is sold into the British army and later captured by the Germans. It is also a coming of age drama, a feuding family saga, a homily about friendship and honour and a nostalgic homage to a long vanished England of misty meadows and ploughing matches. Quite a lot to get into two and a half hours.
Handspring Puppet Company’s horses are works of art in themselves: the arrival on stage of full-grown Joey brought gasps of delight from the audience. It is tribute to the immense skill of the performers that you almost immediately forget to see the three actors needed to bring the horses to life. Computer animation and special effects have made huge breathtaking battle scenes essential audience requirements in modern war films. Projection, inventive use of a revolve, excellent lighting and costumes, music, song and an actor in the role of a chorus – in short the very elements of theatre itself – make War Horse more than hold its own as a spectacle. Unfortunately you sometimes forget to see any of the actors with so much happening on stage.
The play harks back to a time when animals were present in everyday life in roles other than family pet. Horses were a source of labour, a means of transport and a valuable source of income from breeding and trading. Footage of grief stricken farmers during the recent foot and mouth crisis was deemed to be news in itself – as if there were something unusual or unseemly in their sorrow over their (live)stock. A backlash is in progress against the Donkey Sanctuary for having too much money whilst the new moving monument to animals in war on Park Lane in London reads: ‘They had no choice’. There are simultaneous currents of confusion, cynicism and sentimentality in our attitude to animals 90 years on.
Michael Morpurgo shows horses being treated with appalling cruelty and immense compassion during the war. It is to his credit that soldiers from both armies display both attitudes. The scenes involving the German army are some of the most engaging because – unless you can speak German – you are suddenly in the same position as the horses: bewildered by the harsh fearful cries of the men who surround you and trying to make sense of their panicked body language to work out what is going on. A truce scene, during which soldiers from both sides clamber out of their trenches to rescue Joey from barbed wire, is possibly gilding the lily but Morpurgo succeeds in invoking the horror of trench war without succumbing to the temptation of blaming the Germans for it. It is a genuinely terrifying British tank that frightens Joey into the barbed wire and ushers in the era of modern warfare with its impersonal killing machines.
Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris’ production is very much an ensemble piece and some of the minor characters tend towards the one-dimensional. Angus Wright, as Joey’s second benefactor Hauptmann Muller, does not quite steal the show from Luke Treadaway who plays Albert Narracott, Joey’s first owner. Jamie Ballard is also impressive as the sympathetic Major Nicholls and his ghost.
The events in the plot that lead to its resolution are highly improbable but the play is none the worse for that and, if you can make it to the end without crying, then you should race to A & E and demand a chest X-Ray which will reveal a rough lump of flint where your heart should be.
War Horse runs at the National Theatre in London until 14 February 2008.
nationaltheatre.org.uk/warhorse
The cast and creative team talk about the experience of bringing War Horse to the stage, and audience members talk about their reaction to the show.
