Abstract
Every culture plays, and games are part of a common global understanding. Beginning with director Tom Morris’s identification of the theatre audience’s role as part of an “imaginative game,” this introductory chapter develops the idea of considering the relationship between the audience and the performer in the context of a game with agreed-upon rules. Using the National Theatre/Handspring Puppet Company production of War Horse and its many adaptive offshoots as a case study, this section foregrounds the concepts of play and the audience’s role as a way of understanding how we interact with theatrical properties.
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1. Anthropomorphised horses feature memorably in Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, and in several volumes of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series, notably The Magician’s Nephew and The Horse and His Boy.
- 2.
2. The West End engagement closed at the time of publication, in March 2016; an additional tour is planned for 2017 (“Final Extension Announced”).
References
Kohler, Adrian. “Thinking Through Puppets.” Handspring Puppet Company. Ed. Jane Taylor. New York: David Krut, 2009, 42–150.
McConachie, Bruce. Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Millar, Mervyn. The Horse’s Mouth: How Handspring and the National Theatre Made War Horse. London: Oberon Books, 2007. Rev. ed.
Millar, Mervyn. Personal Interview (Jackman and Malone via Skype). 2 July 2015 (2015b).
Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Dir. Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones. Feat. Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, John Cleese. Python (Monty) Pictures, 1975. Feature Film.
Morpurgo, Michael. War Horse. London: Kaye and Ward, 1982.
Murray, Simon. Jacques Lecoq. London: Routledge, 2003.
War Horse: The Concert. Leeds and Salford Quays, November 2012. http://michaelmorpurgo.com/news/war-horse-the-concert
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Malone, T., Jackman, C. (2016). Introduction: Playing the War Horse Game. In: Adapting War Horse. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59475-4_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59475-4_1
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