Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
Five stars
The audience gasps with shock mid-way through the
second act of the National Theatre of Great Britain’s latest tour of their epic
staging of Michael Morpurgo’s World War One-set novel. When they do, that’s
when you know the power of Marianne Elliot and Tom Morris’ puppet-led spectacular
is still intact. A decade after it was created, any dead horses involved categorically
aren’t being flogged.
The opening and closing of Nick Stafford’s adaptation,
overseen in this revival by Katie Henry, features a show of collective strength
led by Bob Fox’s hearty renditions of John Tams’ Norfolk-inflected songs. This looks
drawn from the NT’s 1980s template of folksy radicalism. Once foal Joey is brought
to staggering life by a dozen puppeteers in constructions designed by Basil
Jones and Adrian Kohler of South Africa’s phenomenal Handspring Puppet Company,
it becomes an even more impressive spectacle.
As Joey is sold to the army, only to be followed by
Albert, the boy who trained and loved him, the horse becomes a symbol of how
war can break and brutalise. Accompanied by Adrian Sutton’s sweeping score, at
times things take a balletic turn, as they do with Joey’s fleeting pas de deux
with a tank. An increasingly grey split-open sky ebbs and flows with designer
Rae Smith’s explosive sketches, animated and projected by Leo Warner and Mark
Grimmer of Edinburgh International Festival favourites, 59 Productions.
The horses may be the stars here, but a cast of
twenty-two led by Thomas Dennis as Albert deliver something equally heroic. Forget
Spielberg’s film version. There is more flesh, blood, muscle and guts on show
here than any wide-screen rendition can muster. All of which suggests that War
Horse is unlikely to be put out to grass for some time yet.
The Herald, April 20th 2018
ends
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