The War Horse is a stunning stage show featuring rideable horse puppets manipulated on stage by puppeteers whose actions are so skilfully engaging, the audience stops noticing them. The show has smashed box office records in London and New York, and has been made into a movie by acclaimed director, Steven Spielberg.
The War Horse is based on a childrens’ book by Michael Morpurgo and the story is told through the eyes of Joey, a foal separated from his mother at a horse sale. He ends up on a farm in Devon with Albert, a farmer’s son who lovingly raises Joey but who must part with him when Joey is commandeered by the British as a World War 1 cavalry mount. The War Horse stage show is told through the human characters rather than through the eyes of the horse, as in the book.
Joey is sent to the battle front in France, first serving the British army before being captured and used by the German army to pull ambulances and guns. After that he ends up as a farm horse in France but gets injured after becoming tangled in barbed wire and is left to fend for himself.
Meanwhile, even though at 16 years of age Albert is officially too young to enlist, he manages to join the army, determined to search for Joey on the battlefield.
The author was moved to tell the story after discovering that along with the human cost of World War 1, some 2 million horses were also involved and that when the war ended, most were sold to the French for meat.
The horse puppets for the show were made by Handspring, a South African company set up in 1981 to create childrens’ puppet theatre, and they specialise in puppets where the human puppeteers are visible on stage. Before embarking on The War Horse, they created a show called The Tall Horse, where a life-size puppet giraffe was manipulated by puppeteers on stilts!
Handspring were invited to make the horse puppets for The War Horse, and during the first workshop they came up with cardboard horse masks with paper manes. Next they tried making a horse’s spine by using ladders carried by two actors and discovered that while these were strong enough to hold a rider, a physiotherapist advised against it!
Gradually a horse shape evolved and comprised a skeleton of cane and metal with a thin, stretchy, coloured polyester 'skin' on the inside but it was too heavy and eventually abandoned. The final Joey puppet weighs 30kg and is manipulated by three actors to walk, trot, canter and gallop...two actors are inside the horse working his front and hind legs while a third puppeteer controls the head using a rod, controlling the expressive ears with levers attached to bike brake cables. All the puppeteers’ costumes are similar to that of the human cast, which helps them blend in and look part of it all.
When a rider is on the horse’s back, each puppeteer inside the horse is carrying 50kg and they often suffer from neck pain due to the awkward position they have to remain in.
The horse puppets are 7 feet tall (2.12 metres) which makes them a whopping 21 hands!
One puppeteer is responsible for the hind legs and tail while another is in charge of the front legs, and all four legs are moved via levers. The puppeteers also provide the appropriate horse sound effects such as whinnying and snorting during each performance.
“It’s dark, it’s very hot, you get a lot of knocks on the head, and all your hair is yanked out by the strings around you,” one puppeteer commented. The two puppeteers can’t see one another yet have to interact to bring Joey to life. They spent many hours observing real horses and decided that they...and all the other horse puppeteers in the show...had to be disciplined and stay still so their ‘horse’s’ body language didn’t dominate the human dialogue, yet still give the illusion that the horse is a living, breathing animal and they achieve this by moving gently up and down and perhaps stamping a hoof now and then.
The tail is controlled by three cables acting as tendons, producing movement based on a horse’s actual anatomy. The horse’s leg and hoof are raised by loose cables that the puppeteers move up, then let gravity do its work for the leg to drop down again.
Most of the puppeteers have a background in the circus, gymnastics, dance or acrobatics and they do an hour of aerobic exercise before each show. They also do wrist strengthening exercises plus have deep tissue massages twice a week.
There are a total of 22 puppets in the show, including two main characters...Joey, and a thoroughbred named Topthorn, who meet on the battlefield. There’s also horses named Coco and Heine, four cows, a goose, four birds and five model soldiers.
While most actors usually have understudies, The War Horse puppets have a ‘Vet’ and spare parts on standby backstage, including spare legs and two spare heads and necks!
The horse puppets’ design won an Oliver Award, which are similar to the Academy Awards but for the theatre.
The show reduces many audience members to tears, especially during the final stages when they discover if Joey and Albert find one another admist the war, and find out the fate of not only them, but Topthorn as well.
The good news is that The War Horse will be appearing in Melbourne late in 2012…for a horse-lover, it’s a show not to be missed!