A Play Like No Other

"It's not a musical!"  That was the disappointed comment of an audience member near me, at the intermission.  Theatregoers in major cities have become so accustomed to musical shows as the main genre they encounter -- a sad comment on the state of the theatre.  And while the "legitimate" theatre (I hate that term almost as much as I hate "straight" theatre) has much to learn from musicals, there are times when the lesson can be too well learned -- the fragmentary nature of scripts in musicals and the excessive reliance on flashy technical whiz-bangs can become ludicrous when actors are trying to create real and believable characters.

None of those things went wrong with the stage production of War Horse, which I saw last night.  Yes, there is a fair bit of flashy technical work with lighting and sound but it is always kept at the service of the play.  Yes, the script is bitty but when the scene changes move so quickly and smoothly that becomes an unimportant issue.  The best learned lesson is that music does indeed heighten the emotions, and here the use of popular songs and music from the early years of the last century in England was carefully used to underscore the key moments.  The singers who took us from scene to scene with their music-as-commentary were completely in key with the concept that their role was to discreetly support the dramatic action, not dominate and control it.

Central to this play is the unique collection of horse puppets whose operators create one of the main central characters of the story.  No pretense that the puppeteers don't exist, they are plainly visible, right in the open, and garbed in period clothes.  But it takes only a few minutes for you to forget them -- or at least lose sight of the connection -- and accept the horses as real, living, breathing creatures.  Once that happens, the story takes wings and begins to soar.

Someone should make use of this concept in staging a realistic Wagner Ring!

The actors playing the human characters were all very good too.  Special props to Alex Furber as the young Albert Narracott, who (like so many of his generation) has to grow up very quickly indeed when war swallows him.  A very telling moment is his return at the end, when his mother at first doesn't recognize him and tells his father that she sees "a man on a horse". 

Brad Rudy and Richard McMillan are both favourite Canadian actors of long standing, and the interplay between them as two brothers was strong, memorable, and totally believable.  It's especially good to see McMillan in a serious role.  He's a great comedian, with marvellous timing, but there's so much more to him than that and here we got to see it, in spades.  Tamara Bernstein Evans was also very memorable as Albert's mother, Rose, a caring mother and wife with a backbone of steel.  Patrick Galligan movingly created the other key character of Friedrich Müller, who reminded us powerfully that human emotional responses to war spread across all borders.

I don't go in for big-ticket commercial productions in Toronto as a rule, but this show is a must-see!