Culture: January 2008 Archives
It was no statue, no monument, no model. It was flesh and bone: 18 hands of taut muscle and sculpted flanks, such was the way this horse moved. Yet, flicking his tail and twitching his ears as if troubled by flies, this was a horse made of wood, a fragile and skeletal cane frame, bent round plywood and bound by twine. It could trot and gallop, bolt and rear, and, with aluminium spinal structures, it could comfortably carry a man as well. But it wasn’t just that he (a stallion named Joey) could do all these things which enthralled; it was how he did them, how he breathed, how he shivered with fear, bent down to feed, and kicked against the stable with his hind legs when cornered by men he did not trust. Operated by three puppeteers, two inside moving the main body and legs with another outside overseeing the head and neck, the audience was invited to fill in the gaps, to forget the wood, and instead fall heart first into a story of a young boy separated from his horse by The War. That’s the thing with puppets. In communicating ideas and stories that real people and animals can’t touch, those watching are forced to turn to their own imaginations to complete what they see. And in the imagination, what we see and feel can be so much more moving than any black and white tale that allows for no interpretation whatsoever. You feel involved, a part of the action.
To even imagine, in the first place, bringing Michel Morpurgo’s classic children’s tale, War Horse, to the stage would be one thing; going ahead with it and pulling it off as the Handspring Puppet Company have done with the National Theatre is quite another.
If you can find tickets, go. If not, try again.
And while on the subject of puppets, perhaps some of you missed this extraordinary piece of puppetry from the Royal de Luxe theatre company last year:
