Preview: War Horse

Pictures: Brinkhoff Mögenburg

The National Theatre’s extraordinary adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse finishes its national tour at the Hippodrome this month and next. Steve Wright saddles up.

The inspiration for Michael Morpurgo’s best-selling children’s novel, latterly made into a spectacular piece of theatre, was a conversation in the pub of his small Devon village over 30 years ago.

“Sitting in front of the fire was an old gentleman from the village and, just making conversation, I said to him ‘I hear you went to the First World War as a young man’,” Morpurgo recalls. “He said, ‘I was 17. I was there with horses,’ and started talking about his time there.

“One thing he told me, which touched me enormously, was that his best friend on the front line was his horse because he could tell that horse stuff that he never dared talk about with his chums. Like the terror and horror of what they’d seen that day and his longing for home. This old bloke said to me – ‘that horse listened’.”

Intrigued, Morpurgo subsequently learned from the Imperial War Museum that around a million horses left these islands to fight in the Great War – and that some 65,000 returned. “I remember thinking, ‘hang on – that’s almost exactly the same number of men that died. Horses and men didn’t just die in the same numbers, they died in the same way – they died on the wire, in the mud, they were machine-gunned, they died of disease, exhaustion, stress. They shared this thing, together.

“So I thought, ‘there’s an extraordinary story here’. Although there were lots of stories about the War, all from one side or the other, no one seemed to have told the story from a neutral position. I thought the horse could tell the story.”

Morpurgo’s War Horse was released in 1982. It wasn’t until the mid 2000s, though, that the author received a call from Tom Morris (now Bristol Old Vic’s Artistic Director – back then Associate Director at the National Theatre), who said that, after their success with His Dark Materials, the NT were looking for a project involving a wonderful puppet company called Handspring – and that they were interested in War Horse.

The result was the NT’s memorable production of War Horse, Morpurgo’s powerful story of a young boy called Albert and his beloved horse, Joey, who has been requisitioned to fight for the British in World War I. Caught in enemy crossfire, Joey ends up serving on both sides during the war before landing in No Man’s Land, while Albert, not old enough to enlist, embarks on a treacherous mission to find his horse and bring him home.

A remarkable tale of courage, loyalty and friendship, War Horse features ground-breaking puppetry work by South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company, which brings breathing and galloping horses to life on stage.

It takes eight months to build a complete set of puppets for the show, handmade by a team of 14 craftsmen and women. The puppets for the three principal horse protagonists are each operated by three puppeteers – the Head, the Heart and the Hind, who work together to create the character of each horse.

After two sellout runs at the National and one in the West End, War Horse’s 15-month UK and Ireland tour winds up this month and next at Bristol Hippodrome.

“His Dark Materials had changed the rules about what kind of work might be staged for adults and children and Nick [Hytner, NT Director] wanted to build on that,” explains Morris, who co-directs the show with Marianne Elliot. “Nick and I both felt that one of the great things about the book was the insight it gave into the First World War. If we were going to make a show, we wanted to treat the subject with the seriousness that it deserved.”

War Horse is at Bristol Hippodrome from Wednesday, 14 January to Saturday, 14 February. For more info and to book tickets, visit http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/war-horse/bristol-hippodrome/