Puppetry goes big time

The New York Times has a review of a new London play, War Horse, by Patrick Healy:

On the bare black stage of the New London Theater, a seven-foot-tall horse breaks into a gallop, round and round, until he pauses for a breath, his flanks heaving lightly. A human approaches; the horse, Topthorn, lifts his head, flexes his ears and shakes his tail. His right front hoof paws the floor, as if to charge. Topthorn is not a real horse, of course, but an intricately constructed puppet in the hit West End play War Horse. He and the play’s other main horse puppet, named Joey, are central characters, and they are as much living, breathing and emotionally aware beings as any award-winning actor here today. (The horses’ creators won an Olivier Award for design.) The play, adapted by Nick Stafford from a novel by Michael Morpurgo, is about a British boy of little means, Albert, who becomes Joey’s owner and best friend, only to lose him when Joey is sold to a British officer to ride into battle in World War One. The loss shatters Albert and leads him to enlist, under-age, so he can fight in Europe as well and maybe find his beloved Joey.
War Horse has drawn critical praise largely because of the masterly design of the horse puppets, each of which has three human puppeteers, two of them working within the frame of the puppet. British and American producers plan to mount “War Horse” in New York in 2011 and are now looking at Broadway theaters and other locations, like the Park Avenue Armory, that would be large enough to house the show, said one of the producers, Bob Boyett. The ideal, by many accounts, would be the Vivian Beaumont Theater, with its wide thrust stage. “This level of puppetry hasn’t been seen on Broadway before, and this is what audiences are going to find riveting,” said Basil Jones, one of the creators of the puppets.
The play was initially conceived by Tom Morris, associate director of the National Theater, whose mandate there, he said, “is to experiment, to cause theater to happen that wouldn’t naturally happen.” In 2005 he was looking for books and stories to adapt as new works of theater, including sources that might lead to collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa, whose play Faustus in Africa had been staged at Mr. Morris’s former artistic home, Battersea Arts Center in London.
“As it happened, one day I was talking to my mother about this, and my mum said, ‘Have you read the story about the horse in the First World War?’ ” Mr. Morris said, breaking into a wide grin. “I just thought: ‘Typical. Mum says, Mum knows, Mum is right!’ ”
When the two men who helped found and now run Handspring, Mr. Jones and Adrian Kohler, were approached with the idea for the play, they said in an interview, they were quickly drawn to the drama and emotion of the story and its characters, especially the horses. The horse Joey narrates the book, and his vivid personality fits with Handspring’s mission of infusing puppets with life. “We always like projects where puppets are not gratuitous additions but are unavoidably necessary,” Mr. Jones said. “Clearly War Horse couldn’t have been brought to the stage without the use of very convincing puppets.”
At first Mr. Morris— who became the play’s co-director (with Marianne Elliott)— wanted to aim for a sort of visual, theatrical poetry by creating the puppets before the eyes of the audience, out of farmyard and war detritus. But Mr. Kohler, as the chief designer, said it was important that at every performance the puppets function reliably.
“Puppeteers use and modify a set of classic movements that have been passed down over centuries,” Mr. Kohler said. “But it is the very prosaic look of the puppet, typified by the wooden joints of Pinocchio, that producers of serious theater struggle with. So the challenge here was to make these puppets look interesting from a sculptural perspective.”
The basic construction material for the horses is cane, which Mr. Kohler soaked to make it more moldable. “It is light, flexible, and the figure increases in strength as more and more struts are bound together,” he said. The struts create the look of joints in the horses’ legs and necks.
Silk patches were then applied to gauze to suggest the animals’ skin patterns and also partly to conceal the two puppeteers inside each adult horse. (A third, little horse portrays Joey as a foal.) The third puppeteer for each adult horse stands outside the wooden frame, near the head, and moves to and fro in unison with the other two and the horse itself. The effect is such that this puppeteer is all but forgotten by the audience, even though fully visible.
Beneath the skeletal structure of Joey and Topthorn, the puppeteers hold gears and triggers that, when pressed, move body parts of each horse in fluid motion. The ears of the horses, for instance, are driven by bicycle brake cables and are capable of a 180-degree sweep. The tail is controlled by three cables acting as tendons, producing a movement based on the actual anatomy of a horse. And the curling of the lower leg and hoof, as the horse raises its leg, is controlled by so-called passive tendons, loose cables that are moved first by the puppeteers and then by sheer gravity. What makes the horse puppets seem truly alive is the way they appear to breathe— an accomplishment that Mr. Kohler described as “a complicated effect that ended in a simple solution. Because the spine of the horses is supported by backpacks worn by the puppeteers inside, the chest manipulator”— the puppeteer handling the chest and front legs— “simply has to bend and straighten his knees, allowing the torso of the horse to raise and lower,” simulating breathing, Mr. Kohler said.
The biggest challenge for the puppet designers and the play’s directors was creating horses that could be ridden by adult actors. In one workshop they tried to put an actor up on a horizontal ladder resting on the shoulders of the two puppeteers inside the horse, and it seemed possible. Ultimately the spine of the horses became an aluminum bridge shouldered by the two puppeteers. They are able to create a galloping motion, with the actor riding above.
Since opening at the National in 2007 and transferring to the West End this spring, War Horse has reduced many London audience members to tears, especially in the final minutes, as they learn the fates of Albert, Joey, and Topthorn and whether Albert and Joey will find each other amid the chaos of war. That two puppets elicit this sort of response has inspired the designers to develop a theory they call micromovement. “We work on the assumption that the audience is in fact far more perceptive than they are normally given credit for,” Mr. Jones said. “Meaning, if the puppet is breathing, even people sitting in the very back row can see it. So even the tiniest movement is important, and those onstage need to be aware of it. It’s this focus on the importance of detail in the horse movement that, strangely, has quite epic emotional resonance.”
During a recent rehearsal some of the puppeteers said that they too have formed intense emotional attachments to their Joey and Topthorn. “I saw the show before I was in it, and I just cried throughout,” said Laura Cubitt, who is in charge of Joey’s hind legs and tail. “In my audition I was quite awestruck at being able to even touch Joey. Becoming part of him, I just feel a huge responsibility to make him fully alive.”
Another puppeteer, Finn Caldwell, who handles Topthorn’s front legs, chest and breathing motions, said that the physical pain of the job had also bonded him to the horse. The puppeteers receive deep-tissue massages twice a week, and some have been to physical therapy; whenever the horse puppets break, meanwhile, they are treated by two “vets” who are on standby backstage. “When you give so much physically, when your knuckles are bleeding, when you have to commit to the pain, you have to ask yourself, ‘What is it for?’ ” Mr. Caldwell said. “I know what it’s for. I love these horses.”