I’m in New York this week for meetings and plays. As I always do here, I gorge on plays. Somehow I’ve managed to cram eight plays into five days. I stay at the YMCA and what I save on lodging I spend on play tickets. I love visiting New York!
I just saw War Horse, the play adapted by Nick Stafford from Michael Morpurgo’s novel of the same name, about the British cavalry’s use of horses in the First World War. The play is in the midst of a successful run at Lincoln Center. It won five awards at the 2010 Tonys, including Best Play. Developed by London’s National Theatre, the play was presented there for two sold-out seasons before crossing the Atlantic.
Having read the play and now seen it, I can say that while the script is serviceable, what takes your breath away and stays with you is the stagecraft – the set design (surprisingly simple), lighting, music, soundscape, video projection, and most of all – the horse puppets. To get a sense of the magic of these puppets, see this brief video montage produced by Lincoln Center.
I had an ulterior motive in seeing War Horse. My newest play, Rousseau and Hobbes, has several speaking chimpanzees and at this point it’s an open question how to represent those primates on stage. We are planning for a premier production next year in Seattle.
The War Horse puppets were created by Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones and their Handspring Puppet Company in South Africa. Their puppets really are amazing. It’s obvious that the creators closely studied how horses really move. The horse-puppets are life-size. To my eyes they appeared even larger but that may have just been the stage-magic.
What most endeared me to these puppets was not their large scale or realistic gait or hooves clopping, as impressive as those things were. It was the tiny details: the ears twitch, the tail flicks, the rib cage heaves. I sat in the next to last row of the mezzanine yet these details were perceptible. It was an excellent demonstration of how in art, details deliver the truth. It’s a variation on the paradoxical axiom that the more specific writing is, the more universal it can be.
War Horse has now been made into a movie by Steven Spielberg and is being released for this year’s holiday season. Here’s the trailer. The movie will probably be successful but I doubt it will convey anywhere near the magic that those puppets do on stage. In fact, viewing the play montage next to the movie trailer provides a succinct lesson in how an aesthetic advantage of the stage is that it is not harnessed to realism the way films are.
