War Horse, the Play: Imagination Trumps CGI

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Joey the 'Horse'

I’ve just had a glorious and magical evening. After getting shut out of the play War Horse in both New York and London, I finally caught it in a local cinema, courtesy of a National Theater Live broadcast from London. Viewing an NT Live! production in an American cinema isn’t as good as strolling the South Bank of the Thames before taking in a show, but it’s cheaper and the view is better. But that’s not what has me juiced about seeing War Horse.

The play is touching, sweet, and moving–a sort of My Friend Flicka adapted for the trenches of World War One. A cynic make say that the narrative is a bit ‘thin,’ and so it is, but it’s a different kind of storytelling. It’s the kind that lives in the imagination and asks viewers to fill in the blanks in ways that films, video games, and CGI effects sometimes fail to engage both brain and heart. For those who think maybe we’ve become too slick for our own good, the play proves that the simple done well triumphs detached sophistication. Think I exaggerate? Director Nick Stafford did something very few have done: he kicked Stephen Spielberg’s butt.

As I’m sure you know, in 2011 Spielberg brought War Horse to the screen. It was neither a hit nor a bomb. The movie cost $70 million to make and it covered costs in the U.S. market–just barely; it ranks a mere 22^nd (of 27) on the Spielberg movie moneymaking machine. The play War Horse made more on American stages than Spielberg on the screen. The London numbers are astronomical–as are those in Toronto, Melbourne, Sydney, Dublin, and Berlin. In addition, they play generates millions more though NT Live broadcasts. Now consider that there are roughly 260 professional theaters in the entire of the United States and over 40,000 movie screens. Spielberg’s film may have made marginally more money through foreign and DVD releases, but if you break it down by revenue-per-venue, Stafford creamed him.

How did a guy working with a bare stage, a revolving turntable, some sticks, a swath of torn sheet, a slide projector, and puppets trump the king of movie fantasy? Simple: Stafford beat him at his own game. Spielberg told us the story; Stafford made us feel it. Spielberg showed us; Stafford asked us to dream. Spielberg gave us stunning detailed visuals; Stafford gave us bare bone essentials and invited us to imagine. The play’s ‘horses’ are little more than thin metal rods and gears held together by cable and covered in strips of leather. As many as six puppeteers at a time work the ‘horses,’ some partially visual inside the exoskeletons and others in plain view manipulating the puppets. Except, soon, we don’t see them at all. In our mind’s eye chestnut red “Joey” and midnight black “Topsoil” are mighty steeds. There is a moment in the play in which Joey is an awkward colt being trained by teenaged Albert. As he is being galloped around and around in a circle, the colt puppet frame vanishes and Albert is astride a stallion. The audience gasped. Game, set, and match to Stafford.

But I have not come to bury Stephen Spielberg–rather to praise flights of fancy. We live in an information age, but we sometimes take this too literally. Too much information can overwhelm; it can also blunt creativity, fantasy, and thought. Sometimes we confuse images with imagery. Like him or not, Stephen Spielberg is a master storyteller, but at least in this case, he gave us too many pictures and left too little to the imagination.

I was exhilarated when I left War Horse. I felt that sense of wonderment that was so strong when I was a boy and (alas!) is under exercised by most adults, me included. I experienced the rapture that comes from actively engaging in a story rather than passively receiving it. It was–magic. All hail the wizards, shanachies, tellers of tall tales, wordsmiths, raconteurs, fabulists, poets, actors, minstrels, sleight-of-hand con men, and other casters of cantrips who amuse us, but also have the power to make us muse.  Rob Weir