War Horse

War Horse, directed by Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris, lives and dies by its audience’s capacity for sentimentality – sentimentality that can be expected from a story about a teenager who enlists in World War I to save his beloved horse, Joey. Joey is played by one of Handspring Puppet Company’s horse puppets, and made of aluminium, stretched cane and Georgette fabric. Puppeteers give breathing, tail-flicking life to a variety of animals with these ingenious puppets – the moment when the full-grown Joey bursts onto the stage, strong enough to support protagonist Albert on its back, is a thunderclap of technical marvel and theatrical panache. The puppeteers’ performance as a goose is impressive, always reliable for a laugh to break up the pastoral drama of the early scenes, and the dramatic entrance of a tank later in the play. A digital backdrop used to add an extra dimension to the play’s visuals feels like an unnecessary distraction after the first time, as does the musician who wanders on stage to sing folk music at the play’s emotional moments.

Beyond its puppets and digital effects, there’s not much to War Horse. The direction of the human characters is uneven: the auctioning of Toby in a busy town square has a cluttered and unfocused sense to it, and Scott Miller, who plays Albert, suffers from his exaggerated interactions with Joey — even for a rural innocent of 13, his childishness comes across as deeply silly in his first few scenes with the horse. Despite the paper-thin script, Miller is able to eke out an impressive amount of pathos in the very last couple of scenes. But War Horse is based on children’s book, and despite its supposed scaling up into theatre for everybody, the plot points and thematic notes can only come as fresh if the audience has never engaged with war narratives before. Blockbuster theatre of recent years has had a tendency to prioritise technological wizardry over development of plot, character, and emotional heft, and disappointingly War Horse does the same. While the puppet at the centre of the play might be able to support a person, it can’t quite shoulder the burden of more than two-and-a-half hours of this tedium.