How much do I admire the National Theatre’s definitive production of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse which opened a two week run at the Grand Opera House last night? Let me count the ways. It’s bold in its staging and opens with a long non-verbal introduction to a peaceful, pre-war England on the cusp of the twentieth century. We see actors parading songbirds high on long sticks, hear music and eventually folk song and see drawings of the countryside between two dark washes of colour on the set.
Then it’s off to the auction where we meet the War Horse of the title, at this stage a wooden puppet-pony, brilliantly made and manipulated. Joey, as he will come to be known by his young owner, is thoroughbred and being bid for by men who wouldn’t have use for a hunter. He’s acquired by drunken farmer Ted for the princely sum of 39 guineas, largely to outsmart his brother Arthur, and trouble begins. The auction reminded me of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, except there a person is auctioned off. Yet Joey is almost a person and as the big puppet, enormous in his mature stage, moves, snorts, snuffles at people (and there was a running gag about people wiping off the snot), we understand the close connection between him and Albert, the young lad from Devon whose feckless father bought the beast.
And it is, in a way, a love story, between boy and horse, Our emotional withers are wrung when Joey is sold on, after the father promised him to his devoted son. And the ultimate betrayal happens when Joey is selected for war duties on the dangerous Western front in France. As Germany faced off against the British Empire, young men and animals went to their inevitable deaths. You don’t think anything new can be said about World War One, whose horror we know from not only the great poets of the era including Wilfred Owen but also from programmes including a telling episode of Blackadder. But there is, and Morpurgo manages to engage our emotions – people were in tears at the end and at the risk of spoiling things, it is a happyish ending – in a new way.
We see the damage done to people, we experience the coming together of Tommies and German foot soldiers in No man’s land, which is well known, but we also see what you could call collateral psychological damage. The mother of Albert, sensing he may never get back, the ex-Boer war hero uncle Arthur, whose nervous son with shell shock dies. And above and beyond this is the suffering of the not so dumb animals, set against the lyricism of the music.
The acting is outstanding, with Tom Sturgess as Albert so touching, his parents (Karl Haynesand Jo Castleton) great too and the chorus powerful. For once, the standing ovation and lengthy applause were deserved.
Jane Hardy
War Horse runs at the Grand Opera House until February 15.
