Review: War Horse, National Theatre ★★★★½

War Horse, National Theatre, photo credit: Brinkhoff-Moegenburg

War Horse Twenty years on and still genuinely new

War Horse is approaching its twentieth year. When it first galloped onto the Olivier stage in October 2007, directed by Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris, it received widespread five-star reviews. Now, following a sell-out national tour, the production has returned to the National Theatre where it all began, with Tom Morris directing once more and Katie Henry as revival director. The question everyone is quietly asking is whether it can still do what it did. The answer, emphatically, is yes.

Before we get to the puppets – and we will get to the puppets – it is worth remembering where this story comes from and why it matters. Michael Morpurgo published the original novel in 1982, writing for upper primary school children about a red bay horse named Joey, his young owner Albert Narracott, and the devastating separation brought about by the First World War. Morpurgo is a writer who does not talk down to children. He meets them where they are, and hands them facts and fear and pain without apology. He and his wife have run Farms for City Children since 1976, giving urban children the experience of working farms in Devon, Pembrokeshire and Gloucestershire, and that deep love of the countryside and of animals runs through War Horse like a vein of iron.

The adapted stage play, written by Nick Stafford in association with the Handspring Puppet Company, has now been seen by over eight million people worldwide, won more than twenty-five major awards and played over three thousand West End performances. A special Tony Award was given to the puppet designers. It doesn’t really need much further introduction. If you haven’t seen it, this is your moment to make amends.

Tom Sturgess plays Albert, and his is a performance of warmth and determination that earns our complete investment from the first scene. Jo Castleton as Rose Narracott brings a quiet, careful dignity to the role of his mother, and Stephen Beckett as the unreliable, stumbling Ted Narracott is painfully believable. Throughout, the acting is extremely strong, the singing, led with beauty by Sally Swanson as the Singer, is painfully exquisite in parts. She takes us by the hand and leads us into a piece of magic.

Rae Smith‘s set and costume design, paired with her pencil-drawn illustrations, are an act of genius. With help from John Tams‘ folk song-making, the opening of the show captures rural southwest England so precisely that it aches. A ripped-notebook projection screen at the back carries pencil illustrations of horses and fields, reminiscent of the most beloved of cosy English childhood stories: the kind that line the shelves of primary classrooms in hushed, well-worn paperback editions. It takes us straight back inside the feeling of a children’s book.

And then, as we move into the war, into the Somme and the trenches and the mud, those same projections darken and distort, and the contrast between where we began and where we have arrived is all the more devastating for how tenderly we were handled at the start.

The sound design by Christopher Shutt is extraordinary, and the lighting by Rob Casey (working from the original Paule Constable design) takes us into the full horror of trench warfare: the cacophony, the blinding flares, with the projections by 59 Studio darkening and accelerating behind the action until you feel that you are inside it rather than watching it.

There are one or two moments in the middle sections where the pace eases. We spend considerable time watching Joey learn to pull a plough, which is necessary for what comes later but does slow the momentum. And in the war scenes, some of the repeated routines of farm and field mirror the repetition of the trenches themselves, which is perhaps the point, though it is also, on occasion, mildly testing. These are gentle observations in the context of what the production achieves.

And now to the puppets —

The horses are the work of the South African Handspring Puppet Company, founded by Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones. Watching them, we are reminded of Japanese Noh theatre, that convention where black-clad stagehands move props in plain sight and are simply accepted as invisible. Here that idea is taken and transformed: the puppeteers are very much present and costumed, and yet you forget them entirely, because these animals can move so many different parts of themselves. Built from cane, aluminium, leather and aircraft cable: they are utterly plausible as animals that walk, trot, canter, rear, and can be ridden at speed.

Brinkhoff-Moegenburg photo of War Horse play

The arrival of Joey on stage is not what you might expect. There is no instant ovation. The audience pauses, and I watched this happen last night. They look. They begin to absorb what they are seeing. And then, after a moment that seems longer than it is, the applause comes, because they have had to take it in before they could understand what they were experiencing. Twenty years on, the puppets remain a revelation.

They are also, devastatingly, able to die. When a horse falls, the puppeteers step away. What remains is an empty shell: slack, still, emptied of breath, a quietly shattering and moving image.

The arrival of Joey on stage is not what you might expect. There is no instant ovation. The audience pauses, and I watched this happen last night. They look. They begin to absorb what they are seeing. And then, after a moment that seems longer than it is, the applause comes, because they have had to take it in before they could understand what they were experiencing. Twenty years on, the puppets remain genuinely new.

The scene where young men fall in battle feels right, the projection fills with blood before transforming into poppies. It is almost unbearably moving. It is also, in the most tangible theatrical sense, what we are doing when we wear a poppy each year. Lest we forget: on stage, in the plainest and most beautiful possible terms. The choral scenes in which the village women read the names of the fallen and fall themselves, because that happened in villages across this country week by week and name by name, carry that weight too.

A stunning piece of theatre, still a revelation after 20 years.

As someone who has taught Morpurgo’s books in a primary classroom, and who has heard him speak with quiet passion about the duty we owe children when we write about war, I believe War Horse is a story that children deserve to know. But it is also a story that speaks to adults. It is about love and loss and the way animals can save us, about what the countryside and simple work and the bond between a boy and a horse can mean in a world that is otherwise very frightening indeed. It is also, simply, a stunning piece of theatre.

All photography: Brinkhoff-Moegenburg