Everybody plays; games are universal. “Play” is both an elastic term and a ubiquitous practice, which factors into any number of cultural pursuits. For instance: we go to see a play; we play a game of football; we play poker; we play out a fishing line; or we press play on a media player. Finn Caldwell, associate puppet director for War Horse, a stage adaptation of a children’s novel developed by the National Theatre of Great Britain and South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company, activates the concept of “play” as a unifying force:
In this regard, and as we will explore throughout this book, “play” also encapsulates childlike imaginative interaction, as with children who agree to play a game where a broomstick is a horse, or a couch is a boat surrounded by lava. Imaginative play of this kind fosters “connections to important cognitive and social skills, such as symbolic thinking, theory of mind, and counterfactual reasoning” (Weisberg 249). Play is also, as we will see, a state into which adults may temporarily regress, given the right environment.When you come out onstage with some wood that is made into a shape, you are implying to the audience “I’m going to play a game with you. Do you want to play along?” If the audience stays and they watch, then they are agreeing to play this game. It is like playing with toys. I think it invites adults to be open, like a child.(Caldwell, qtd. in Lester 11)
Indeed, throughout his career, master teacher Jacques Lecoq unequivocally stressed the importance of play in his theatre. So far as his actors were concerned, the propensity for play (or le jeu) was a core competency, required as a precondition for continued training within his studio (Murray 2003, 66). Rather than inscribe a discrete meaning on the term, Lecoq frequently exploited its breadth to interweave a diverse set of interrelated practices. Lecoq encompasses more traditional references to the text as “play” or the actor as “player,” and often allows these terms to bleed into colloquial usage to draw “child’s play” and “games” into the conversation. Lecoq and contemporaries like Coupeau modelled their concepts of play in performance upon an idealised return to the playful impulses and energetic spontaneity of childhood (Murray 2003, 66). More recently, Bruce McConachie has suggested play might underpin the historical origins of theatre itself, though this is less a historical claim than a strong belief that behavioural processes designated by play lie at the very heart of theatre performance practice (2013).
Collaborative theatrical protocols of play are most visible in a rehearsal context or devising process, in physical and verbal group improvisation, perhaps within a set of styles, rules, texts, or character schema germane to the work at hand. To successfully play an imaginative game, participants (either explicitly or implicitly) agree to rules and limitations which govern structure: if a child declares a broomstick a horse, the collaborative game only proceeds if their playmates agree it is so. This reflects the fundamental rule of theatrical improvisation of “always say yes,” or better still, “yes, AND” to ensure the improvised scene is sustained and develops (Fey 78). On the other hand, if someone breaks the rules of a game, they are penalised, or the game simply halts.
Nevertheless, in his demand for a playful actor, Lecoq ultimately believed his work aided the audience, invited to take part as co-creators of the onstage vision: “a theatre of movement, but above all a theatre of the imagination” (98). Much like children who imagine the broomstick horse, theatre practitioners—and, crucially, their audiences—collaborate to create a world where they may play freely. Consider that in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), knightly characters playfully (yet earnestly) mime the act of horse riding, closely followed by pages employed to make clopping hoof sounds with halves of coconuts. Monty Python’s game is so absurd it is never internally questioned, and as the audience embraces the game’s rules, they are brought closer to the created world. The spectator assumes the role of the imaginative child’s credulous friends: told the rules of the proposed game, the audience participates with their attention and effectively commits to the game’s rules, presumably so long as the game is still fun.
Despite the prevalence of “play” and “game” in the theatrical process—indeed, “play” is a universally recognised synecdoche in the English-speaking world for a theatrical experience—a broad case study of how play engages with commercial theatre environments is long overdue. To address that, we return to Finn Caldwell’s evocative statement about “wood that is made into a shape.” Caldwell’s example happens to be an especially iconic piece of wood: it is “Joey,” the titular leather and bamboo puppet of War Horse. Based on author Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 children’s novel and adapted by playwright Nick Stafford, War Horse was commissioned in 2005 by the National Theatre of Great Britain as a showcase for South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company. The story focuses on Joey, a draught horse/thoroughbred cross, who grows up on a farm, is loved by a determined boy before he is sold to the army, where he is shipped to the battlefields of World War 1 (WW1) France, where he survives until he is rescued. The stage adaptation of this story employs these fantastical puppets to partake in an immersive theatrical game that requires the audience’s cognitive input for its success. We contend that for this game to be successful, belief in the horse must be performed and enlivened as much by the spectator as by the actors and puppeteers. As we will demonstrate, such play does not imply looseness or ill discipline, but emphasises rules to be followed. Even in the “conventionally” staged War Horse, the “rules” of the game involves belief “the wood that is made into a shape” could be a live horse. The War Horse spectator who buys in to the clearly artificial horse puppets is rewarded with an emotional journey dependent on an oscillatory form of spectatorship: as Lecoq seems to suggest, the audience may “play” from the relative comfort of their seats through the strength of their imaginations. Here lies our crux: how might we say the stationary audience member is a full-bodied, active player in the synthesis of the performance experience?
To answer this question, we consider War Horse in its many different iterations, with particular focus on the sustained successful relationship between Handspring’s now-iconic giant horse puppets from the National Theatre production and its audiences. The National Theatre’s adaptation of a children’s novel described by its author as originally a “huge non-event” (Lyall C1), has become, in less than a decade, one of the twenty-first century’s most iconic new brands. How? It is one thing to credit the impressive puppet creations, the emotive music, or the sentimental reunion storyline, but this gives us little concrete insight into why audiences loved War Horse so much. With War Horse as our primary case study, we examine cognitive processes that comprise an audience’s emotional connections with what are essentially and logically inanimate objects, and the means by which those processes are sustained, both throughout performances and in their aftermath. Emotive relationships between spectator and subject are first earned through the trust and credulity of a public asked to believe that, for example, a puppet horse could live and breathe before them, which extends to other points of adaptive media. In this book, we explore examples of War Horse in adaptation, with specific emphasis on playful notions of process, product, and the ways in which the franchise evolved through various mediums, audiences, and logistical circumstances to develop a vocabulary as the War Horse “game” reached wider groups of spectators.
In the War Horse success story, the audience’s role in the adaptive game has been central. Tom Morris, co-director of the original 2007 London stage adaptation, characterises the relationship between his production and its audiences as an “imaginative game” (Millar 2007, 74). Morris’s “game” indicates mutual agreement between creators and audience, for, as we have suggested, it is difficult to play any imaginative game when only one party joins in. In War Horse, we find evidence of a game that does not demand complete and utter immersion to be complete, but is rather a self-aware, in-process acknowledgement of its efficacy. In this book, we explore how War Horse relies upon different forms of games, along with the vitality of the audience’s immersive interaction with it. In turn, this very immersion leads to questions about how and why those cognitive processes occur, with virtually involuntary physiological responses to selected stimuli.
Why War Horse?
The very fecundity of the War Horse franchise—over multiple formats and mediums—offers steady and varied approaches to multiple layers of cognitive and adaptive theory, and the games that link them. Central to these games are the remarkable, larger-than-life-sized horse puppets designed by South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company, which provide an iconographic touchstone from which all War Horse properties now radiate. Each later adaptive property is an element in War Horse’s game: a concert version; a BBC2 Radio play; an instalment of the orchestral Proms; an Oscar-nominated feature film; a filmed live stage production; a series of museum exhibits; several major stage translations; and a greatly flexible avatar. Such breadth elicits buy-in that resounds beyond artistic appreciation but in a core cognitive appreciation for the life of this horse on an emotive level, which renders the remainder of the production peripheral, yet which also allows the added material to deepen the emotional relationship.
With a first-person horse narrator, Morpurgo’s novel required some remarkable artistic imagination to conceive as a stage play. The protagonist, Joey, describes his thoughts, yet never verbally communicates. The conceit of a “thinking” animal is common in children’s literature,1 where it might be more easily accepted as true by young readers than by adults (see, e.g., Ganea et al.). Zoocentric narratives call on adaptive modes of meaning-making: animals cannot speak (or, in the case of Joey, think) in English, yet a reader accepts the rules of this particular game so long as they are consistently rendered. It should be emphasised that Joey is internally humanised: Morpurgo makes only moderate attempts to imagine what it is like to think like a horse, beyond a general naïveté about what events play out around him (see Payne 13-14). Joey understands all languages spoken around him, yet dispassionately observes his progress without human foreknowledge (such as the national identities of the combatants). The adaptive decision to jettison the novel’s “too Disney” narrative structure (Millar 2007, 19) ultimately shifted War Horse from one imaginative game to another: from a thoughtful horse on the page to an almost living puppet on stage.
Director Tom Morris identified War Horse as a potential adaptation in 2005, and penned a 13-page treatment which formed the basis of a commission for playwright Nick Stafford to complete. Central to this new adaptation was the Handspring Puppet Company creations, life-sized animals that were the company’s speciality (Kohler 2009, 130; Millar 2015b). The challenge for Handspring artistic directors Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler was to discover how “the horse [could] be articulate without speaking” (Millar 2007, 19), which shifted the potential demand on the audience, yet avoided “hurt animal” sentimentality. Jones and Kohler strove to show “the emotional life of a single horse and its relationship to human beings and to other horses, without necessarily making people cry at every moment” (Qtd. in Millar 2007, 76).
After a series of workshops and trials, led by choreographer Toby Sedgwick and puppeteer Mervyn Millar, the stage adaptation opened at the Olivier Theatre in October 2007 to wide acclaim. After two long runs (October 7, 2...