A Packed Week
Between Evensong and an opera, this week'll take the mickey out of us all.
This play marks one of few seen in England (I do hope it's not the best). I read on the Tube about how some guy in the backstage crew of War Horse had been bullied so much that he couldn't stand it anymore and quit. Sissy? Maybe. I tried not to think of that during the show.
Minimalist?
Being a theatre minor, I did my best to suspend disbelief and snootiness. The plot goes a little something like this:
A poor boy gets a horse. He loves it to adulthood. The poor family sells the horse to a captain in WWI. The boy enlists to find the horse. WWI kills most everybody.
With the exception of the bogus plot, lame lanes and excessive overacting (this is NOT me being snooty--this opinion is shared by most students on the program), the director did spectacularly on production design. Obviously the horses were puppets, made of wicker and operated by four to five people. As soon as you suspend your disbelief, a bamboo pole becomes a horse corral, the horses are moving of their own accord, and the goose is your favorite character ever.
After studying all those WWI artists like Levinson and Dix, it was clear that scenes in the play were trying to relive those paintings, and succeeded really well. I was just bothered by the plot, honestly. It's like that part in Independence Day when New York is blowing up, and Vivica what's-her-face is yelling for her dog, and Boomer leaps through the firey air to safety. Even though everyone else dies. I sure hope they don't make a movie.
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