Theatre review: War Horse

Bord Gais Energy Theatre, Dublin

Michael Morpugo’s War Horse has been every writer’s dream of success: published as a children’s book in 1982, it was adapted for the stage in 2007, and filmed by Steven Spielberg in 2011.

The stage show, from London, has been greatly anticipated. It is the kind of show for which the Bord Gais Energy Theatre was designed, and it is difficult to imagine how any other theatre here could have coped with so massive a production.

War Horse does not disappoint as a spectacle: the music, set and special effects are first-rate. We move from the bucolic prettiness of the English countryside to the battlefields of France in World War I, and the production does not stint in its depiction of the horrors of war. Men are shot and blown up; they give lip to their superiors, or desert in disgust; they crack under the strain. At least one German is shown sympathetically, to emphasise that war is not simply the good guys versus the bad.

Most spectacular is the puppetry, by the Handspring Puppet Company. The horses are masterful in their creation and manipulation. Joey, the war horse of the title, is entirely convincing as a racehorse who is trained up as a plough-horse, and then sold into service in the army. He shakes his head and whinnies, he rears up and breaks into a canter about the stage. The birds — from the geese on the farm in England to the crows alighting on the bodies of soldiers in the trenches — are just as impressive.

At its heart, however, War Horse remains a story for children. The hero, Albert Narracott, is an illiterate farm-boy who enlists in the army so he can locate his horse in France. It’s the kind of set-up that worked perfectly well in the novel, but stretches credulity for what, on opening night at least, was a largely adult audience.

The build-up of tension in the first act, especially in the battle scene with which it closes, leaves the audience eager to return for the second.

But there is then too long a diversion into the story of the gallant German officer, and the French girl he befriends on her farm. It gets so hokey that, by the end, one is left wishing the whole thing had wound up sooner.