HOWZAT

In the book, the horse is actually the narrator. From the beginning, this was seen as impossible on stage. The whole thing could have ended up evoking Mister Ed (an American sitcom that starred a talking horse) or a pantomime. The horse still had to be the hero, though, which is why Morris had to ensure he had the best possible puppets.

“It couldn’t be like The Lion King — I mean, they cheat. Their animals talk.” He knew Handspring because of a giraffe called Sennari. Sennari was shipped from Egypt to Marseille in 1826, then taken all the way to Paris, walking past people who had never seen such a bizarre creature. Handspring made a show called Tall Horse out of this story. Morris loved Sennari. “The puppet was absolutely amazing. It had several scenes in which it was just there, being alive, floating over the whole show.” So, Handspring was called in when War Horse was being “workshopped” — theatrical jargon that describes the uncertain period when a show is being put together without any certainty of a full production.

Making the horse was logistical hell. Kohler and Jones would soak their cane in a child’s pool, bend it to shape and ship it to London. Their problem was, how should it be operated? There had to be room inside for puppeteers, so this would have to be another tall horse. It also had to be able to carry a rider; and, on top of all that, it had to have the means of expressing horse movement and horse emotion, so as to give it enough personality to fill the void created by the decision not to use the horse as a narrator. The puppeteers’ solution was to station two men inside the horse and one outside, operating the head with a pole. Ears flick and tails whisk.

“These are all,” Kohler says, “vital indicators that this is a horse.” And when it becomes a horse, not merely an ingenious contraption, some kind of unique puppet magic occurs.

“What the audience feel,” Jones says, “is tremendous exhilaration at the imaginative act they’ve perpetrated among themselves in the process of watching the play — jumping through those imaginative hoops gives people a fantastic feeling, especially young people facing the challenge of imagining this object as a horse and finding they can do it.”

Puppets aside, what is this show about? Why the first world war now? “It happened nearly 100 years ago,” Morris says, “and it's possible to contemplate the horrors of it without feeling you are treading on the sensitivities of people who made the sacrifice or who are still alive. Clearly, the experiences people had were absolutely awful and barely justifiable by any measure. If you had said that in the 1950s or 1930s, though, you would immediately have felt the hackles rising of people who lost loved ones in the war. Now it’s possible to take a slightly more detached view — though not an unemotional one.”

I would add that there’s a kind of deathly purity about the first world war. Fighting Hitler, as Morpurgo points out, was a clear case of right versus wrong. But the logic of the guns of August 1914 is impenetrable to the contemporary imagination. That, combined with the madness of sending walking men and horses to face machineguns, makes this war a pure and shocking emblem of all wars. Contemplating the trenches, we do not see the rights and wrongs of causes, as we do when contemplating Auschwitz: we contemplate the naked human condition. Why do we do such things?

In the end, one can only conclude that we just do; and that, for Morpurgo, is why this is a good subject for children. They should know. “It’s about how we see children, really,” he says. “Having been a father and a grandfather and a teacher, I know young people have eyes and ears on the adult world as they’ve never had them before — through their machines and TVs and DVDs. And when you have this access to the modern adult world, what you cannot do is separate their existence from the rest of our existence, whether we like it or not. They have to look at it and take what they can from it. How else are they going to cut through the rubbish coming from the television they see in the corner?”

The real power of the show, though, is not that this war is just a generalised symbol of violent, human folly. Rather, it is a symbol of specifically contemporary folly, because at the heart of War Horse is the special horror of 1914-18, that of soft flesh confronting hard machine for the first time. It was machineguns that made this war so appalling. And their power, in turn, spawned the tank. The most devastating moment in War Horse is when one of those early, lumbering tanks appears on stage and drives towards Joey, who rears in terror, a noble beast made suddenly fragile, all his grandeur futile.

“The horse confronting the tank,” Morpurgo says, “was one of the great moments of the 20th century.”

The puppet struggles to be alive, only to find technology has made its life obsolete.

War Horse previews at the New London Theatre, WC2, from March 28

bryanappleyard.com

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