War Horse

I am a firm believer of the theatre as a space of unlimited imagination. As the lights go down and the stage is left as the only “living” space in the auditorium, the audience is gradually drawn into a constructed reality that drives their emotion as the characters unfold their stories before their eyes. This is the beauty of the theatre. Everything is live and alive. There is no touch up or second takes as it is with life.

I have heard great things about War Horse since its debut overseas. After a long period of waiting, it finally comes to Sydney. As such I would not pass on this great opportunity to see what the hype is about. And the end result? Not only it did not disappoint, I was reminded once again why I love live theatre so much.

The story of the play, based on the same novel by Michael Morpurgo, was not overly complicated. A boy got a horse, they bond, the horse went to war, the boy followed the horse to the war, and both the boy and the horse experienced the cruelty of war first hand in their own way. The selling point of War Horse was the realistic puppetry that recreated the animals in the play. You got a first taste of the fantastic puppetry skills with the opening scene when the pony was being auctioned. And then you saw the goose (I love that goose), the swallow, the vultures, and subsequently other warhorses that were involved in the war. The fascinating part of the production was the fact that you know they are puppets, but the amount of work that was put into the puppets that they actually made you believe that they are real animals with real personalities. Because of this, the interactions between the animals and the human characters became very convincing. This is true not only for the horses, which were manned by three actors on stage, but also the smaller animals, such as the goose (with one actor only) that completely stole the first few scenes. This is a make believe executed at its highest level.

Apart from puppetry, the set also installed a huge hanging white space in the shape of a torn out sketchbook. During the progress of the play pencil sketched animations were projected onto this space to inform the audience the change of time and space in the story. I personally believe the choice of pencil-sketched animation was incidental as the torn sketchbook was referred to in the story time and time again. Not only this tied in neatly with the story, it also offered a great amount of flexibility for scene changes without involving a huge number of set props.  Also the sketches were so nicely drawn that they became pieces of artworks themselves.

The play also came with a brilliant soundtrack that reflects the time and events of the story perfectly.  An actor who acts as the storyteller sang narration connecting individual scenes to the audience to inform them of additional information. As for individual scenes, there are lots of other songs that identify the time, space and characters relations in the story. There were no real individual arias as such as they are mostly choruses. Nonetheless, these choruses added a lot of weight and musical colour to the warring and unresting tone of the story.

War Horse is a piece of theatrical work perfectly weaved together. It is a powerful exhibition of great skills working together to completely immerse the audience into the world of the story. There were many occasions during the show that I could hear people around me blowing their noses, wowing, and sighing. It is a show that deploys a huge amount of puppetry while successfully convinced you that they are not puppets on stage but real characters, just like all the other actors on the stage. If you are looking for a perfect or near perfect piece of theatre to spend 2.5 hours with, War Horses could probably be one of your best options. 

*War Horse currently running at the Sydney Lyric Theatre until 30th June 2013