Abstract
The process by which the theatrical audience “gets to know” the characters of War Horse develops through multiple factors, assessed here in relation to different adaptations of the work. This begins with author Michael Morpurgo’s narrative strategies fostered to heighten real-world connections to his stories, and expands into puppetry techniques designed to encourage an audience’s relationship with the characters on stage. This chapter also discusses War Horse in mediums including radio, feature film, and filmed live theatre, with an assessment of how the work develops amidst different approaches.
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Notes
- 1.
1. “Source” is used here purely for chronological reasons: this loaded term can often be mistaken to reflect authority or superiority, based on its temporal seniority: this is a practice often termed “fidelity discourse” (see, e.g., Stam 54).
- 2.
2. The Alice puppet now hangs in the lobby at the New London Theatre in a gesture to the original production (Wall).
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3. In Morpurgo’s sequel novella, Farm Boy, the village is named as the author’s home village of Iddesleigh, Devon (30), which inspired the book’s setting (see also Butcher).
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4. Images of the Joey painting are available at http://warhorseart.com/story-joey-painting.php: due to licensing difficulties, we were unable to reproduce them in this book.
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5. “Within the Sogolon traditions from Mali, shows are staged in an open clearing, often a space defined y convention, around which viewers will be seated on the ground. Into this free-form arena, puppet figures of the castelet type will bound. The much-favoured antelope castelet figure is a puppet capacious enough to contain several puppeteers beneath its cloth torso” (Fleishman 190).
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6. Cast member Brendan Murray related that once puppeteers were “in-horse,” others in the company always respected their personal space to foster the focus required for the task (Murray 2015). Another cast member, Ryan Reid, spoke of how when he was “in-horse” to operate Topthorn, he and his fellow puppeteers would ensure human actors kept their respectful distance with (horse-based) verbal and physical cues (Reid 2015).
- 7.
7. With thanks to Nathan Jones from the BBC and Julia Wyatt of Berlin Associates for information on this production.
- 8.
8. So specific is Only Remembered’s connection to War Horse that Morpurgo chose it as the title of a centenary collection of poems and images he edited in 2014.
- 9.
9. Various worldwide productions of War Horse feature prominently in Chap. 6.
References
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Malone, T., Jackman, C. (2016). “We Get to Know Him”. In: Adapting War Horse. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59475-4_2
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