She told The Telegraph: "Shout out has to be given to Warhorse - three of us in this team were in Warhorse. Ms Hytten, who first started learning puppetry as an 11-year-old, dedicated the award to all puppeteers. Actor Habib Nasib Nader provides the voice of the tiger, as well as playing another part in the show as a cook. Three puppeteers are needed to move the tiger model at any one time, with performers dividing the role into “head”, “heart”, and “hind”. It means Fred Davis, Daisy Franks, Tom Stacy, Romina Hytten, Scarlet Wilderink, Tom Larkin and actor Habib Nasib Nader, have jointly won an award whose previous recipients include Eddie Redmayne and Sir Patrick Stewart. The West End play, based on Yann Martel's Booker Prize-winning novel, won five awards from nine nominations, with only Cabaret performing better.Īmong them was Best Supporting Actor which was picked up by seven performers, six of whom are puppeteers, who operate a Bengal tiger, known as Richard Parker. Lassie! Silver! Toto! Try doing that with wooden horses and cardboard cutouts.Īs the novelist Philip Hensher so kindly says: “Sentimentality is just a word you use for a feeling you are declining to join in with.A group of puppeteers have won a Laurence Olivier Award for the time in history on a successful night for Life of Pi at the Royal Albert Hall. And most agreeably, it succeeded with its naked manipulations - to tug at that concern we instinctively feel for animals in danger. preview), applauded with full, if politely restrained, enthusiasm.Īpart from the puppetry (but too much of a good thing), I liked two aspects of Warhorse: one was death - people and horses die abruptly in war, and apart from one halo-lit, crucified-Ascension scene, it didn’t get too heroic. (Though one shouldn’t ignore the dazzling central insight of Warhorse: War is a battlefield! Oops, that’s: War is Hell! Love is a battlefield.) The audience, solid Mum-and-Dad-sans-kids on our night (29 Dec. interval, we were hugely relieved to finally arrive at the wild coincidence that brings the story to a sudden and happy conclusion. Warhorse gets very gun loud and is spattered with war dead, but apart from that is chastely family-friendly fodder.Īt 2.5 hrs inc. As wide as the stage it’s like a phallic piece of torn paper tapering off to a rounded point a punning reminder of a certain absence below: Hung like a horse. But I wasn’t the only one who misheard.)Ī screen is suspended above the action on which is projected graphics, dates and place names (see picture). She finally cries, “Ebony!” But alas, that was too good to be true - it was Emilie. (A shining memory: Albert is trying to coax her name from the terrified French girl, played by the black actress, Belinda Jombwe. There is also Froggified English (farm wife and daughter) and Ze Cherman Hofficer, separated at birth from Get Smart‘s Siegfried. There is a delightful embarrassment of accents: English comes flavoured in Devon clot cream, Oxbridge officer-class and Sergeant Cockney. Quite rightly, puppets, costumes and sets command the attention like the seminal Cats it’s the production design that counts - which actor inhabits which costume is secondary we’re not there to watch them. In any case, if the Horse was wooden, the characters were cardboard cutouts - merely character-shaped people: young innocent Albert, his long-suffering mum, the drunken dad, the cranky uncle, the cowardly cousin. But I couldn’t divine a personality in Joey: the puppet becomes ‘Horse,’ but not a specific horse.Ĭonstant Gardener thought the acting was excruciating, but one person’s Oscar performance is another’s Mrs Brown’s Boys. It gallops round the stage, prances on hind legs, horses around - the movements and neighey noises are remarkably effective. The foal comes on, gangly and unsteady, and you think: but it’s a puppet! Soon enough manifested as the full grown ‘Joey,’ the three-person puppet takes on the power of scale. You know the story: Boy meets horse, boy falls in love, boy loses horse, horse goes to war (WWI), boy follows horse, suffering ensues, boy and horse are reunited, hurrah! And you’ve seen the hook: life-size horse puppetry on stage. Never mind psychology, feel the spectacle. Warhorse is not simple, it’s simple-minded. Fairy tales depend on moral irony, perverse justice and shocking epiphanies. I was going to say Warhorse is simple like a fairy tale, but that’s not right. By submitting this form you are agreeing to Crikey's Terms and Conditions.Īlso maybe (iv) Do I l believe in The Magic of Theatre? If you answer yes to two of the four, or actually, Yes to Q (iii), then this is the horse for your course.
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