MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

War Horse, a production developed by the UK’s National Theatre in association with South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company, opened in 2007. The show was an immediate financial and critical hit and has proved to have a long life, successes due almost entirely to the elaborate, life-sized puppet horses used to depict the play’s main characters, horse-soldiers in WWI. Operated by up to three human manipulators each, these puppets are unusual protagonists, as puppeteer Melvyn Millar describes: “War Horse … asks them [the audience] to invest in two main characters. One of them is a young man [played by a human actor] … So far, so normal. But the other [Joey, a puppet horse] doesn’t speak, doesn’t have normal human relationships or emotions, and is made of wood, cane, and aluminum” (8). The normative language Millar here uses would seem to impute a kind of disability to Joey. Indeed, Millar could just as easily be describing the disabling effects of war on men, many of whom come back from war, like Joey, unable to speak or exhibit “normal human relationships or emotions.” And yet this language, emphasizing the ** divisions between normal and not normal, human and inhuman, does not fully encompass the possibilities engendered by War Horse. Rather, I argue that the triangulation of human, horse, and machine posed by the play’s puppet bodies acknowledges both the precarity of the body—its tendency, usually coded as negative, to slide into disability—as well as the boundary-crossing intimacies that this precarity engenders. By thus emphasizing intimacy over estrangement in a space of war, the puppet bodies at the center of War Horse shatter our received notions about the interrelations of animality, disability, and death.

Millar, Melvyn. The Horse’s Mouth: How Handspring and the National Theatre made War Horse. Morpurgo, Michael. Scholastic, 2007.