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The Theatre of War: Rememoration and the Horse

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The Palgrave Handbook of Artistic and Cultural Responses to War since 1914

Abstract

This chapter interrogates the intricate and relational act of memorialization through the theatre production of War Horse in order to further explain why the use of “live” horse-sized puppets offers the most indelible, though initially unlikely, communication of the impact of war on an audience. In order to do this, it is important to consider the act of memory in the multiple adaptations of the War Horse story, the symbolic associations with the horse throughout history, and how the interconnectedness of humans and horses is critical to understanding its impact on an audience’s understanding and memorialization of the Great War.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Samuel Hynes, A war imagined: the First World War and English culture (London: Bodley Head, 1990).

  2. 2.

    Fay Anderson and Richard Trembath, Witness To War: The History of Australian Conflict Reporting (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2011), 139.

  3. 3.

    Toby Malone and Chris Jackman, Adapting War Horse: Cognition, the Spectator, and a Sense of Play (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 5.

  4. 4.

    “War Horse.” Box Office Mojo. Accessed May 18, 2017. http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=warhorse.htm.

  5. 5.

    John Dean, “Adapting History and Literature into Movies.” American Studies Journal 53, (2009). https://doi.org/10.18422/53-07.

  6. 6.

    Malone and Jackman, Adapting War Horse, 13–14.

  7. 7.

    Ibid., 117–118.

  8. 8.

    Michael Morpurgo, “War Horse: The play to end all wars?” The Telegraph (UK), September 20, 2013. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/10321045/War-Horse-the-play-to-end-all-wars.html.

  9. 9.

    Ibid., 166.

  10. 10.

    Ibid., 21.

  11. 11.

    Monty Roberts, “Bringing a Horse Onstage.” The Lincoln Centre Review 55 (Spring 2011): 20–23.

  12. 12.

    Mervyn Millar, The Horse’s Mouth: How Handspring and the National Theatre made War Horse (London, UK: The National Theatre, 2012), 20.

  13. 13.

    Andrea Gunroe, “The physical theatre of war: Language, memory and gender in Black Watch and War Horse” (Master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 2013); Malone and Jackman, Adapting War Horse; Kim Marra, “Massive Bodies in Mortal Performance: War Horse and the Staging of Anglo-American Equine Experience in Combat,” in Performing Animality, edited by Lourdes Orozco and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).

  14. 14.

    Gunroe, “The physical theatre of war: Language, memory and gender in Black Watch and War Horse,” 19.

  15. 15.

    Ibid., 85.

  16. 16.

    Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 2003), 8.

  17. 17.

    Daniel Martin, “Steven Spielberg: War Horse is a love story.” NME, January 9, 2012. http://www.nme.com/news/film/steven-spielberg-war-horse-is-a-love-story-876085.

  18. 18.

    Malone and Jackman, Adapting War Horse, 23.

  19. 19.

    Ibid., 22.

  20. 20.

    Monica Meadows, “The Horse: Conspicuous Consumption of Embodied Masculinity in South Asia, 1600–1850,” (PhD thesis. University of Washington, 2013), 112. https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/bitstream/handle/1773/25018/Meadows_washington_0250E_12667.pdf;sequence=1.

  21. 21.

    Meadows, “The Horse: Conspicuous Consumption of Embodied Masculinity in South Asia, 1600–1850,” 23.

  22. 22.

    Monica Mattfeld, Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-century Masculinity and English Horsemanship (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 5.

  23. 23.

    Meadows, “The Horse: Conspicuous Consumption of Embodied Masculinity in South Asia, 1600–1850,” 107.

  24. 24.

    Meadows, “The Horse,” 113–114.

  25. 25.

    Marra, “Massive Bodies in Mortal Performance: War Horse and the Staging of Anglo-American Equine Experience in Combat,” 126.

  26. 26.

    Nick Stafford, War Horse: Stage Adaptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 75–76.

  27. 27.

    Kate Dashper, “Learning to Communicate: The Triad of (Mis)Communication in Horse Riding Lessons,” in The Meaning of Horses: Biosocial Encounters, ed. Dona Davis and Anita Maurstad (London: Routledge, 2016), 6–7.

  28. 28.

    Mattfeld, Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-century Masculinity and English Horsemanship, 10.

  29. 29.

    Mattfeld, Becoming Centaur, 10.

  30. 30.

    Mattfeld, Becoming Centaur, 52.

  31. 31.

    Mattfeld, Becoming Centaur, 32–34.

  32. 32.

    Mattfeld, Becoming Centaur, 55.

  33. 33.

    Mattfeld, Becoming Centaur, 61.

  34. 34.

    Mattfeld, Becoming Centaur, 33.

  35. 35.

    Mattfeld, Becoming Centaur, 69.

  36. 36.

    Mattfeld, Becoming Centaur, 122.

  37. 37.

    Mattfeld, Becoming Centaur, 124.

  38. 38.

    Bernard F. Dukore, Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski (New York: Rinehart and Winston, 1974), 74.

  39. 39.

    Marra, “Massive Bodies in Mortal Performance: War Horse and the Staging of Anglo-American Equine Experience in Combat,” 119.

  40. 40.

    Marra, “Massive Bodies,” 121.

  41. 41.

    Stafford, War Horse: Stage Adaptation, 37.

  42. 42.

    Stafford, War Horse, 121.

  43. 43.

    Martin Crotty, Making the Australian Male: Middle-class Masculinity, 1870–1920 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001), 11.

  44. 44.

    “Juvenile Crime in the Nineteenth Century.” British Library Online. May 15, 2014. https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/juvenile-crime-in-the-19th-century.

  45. 45.

    Richard Fotheringhm, Sport in Australian Drama (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 10–11.

  46. 46.

    Michael Peterson, “The Animal Apparatus: From a Theory of Animal Acting to an Ethics of Animal Acts.” TDR: The Drama Review 51, no.1 (Spring 2007): 39; Marra, “Massive Bodies in Mortal Performance: War Horse and the Staging of Anglo-American Equine Experience in Combat,” 122–123.

  47. 47.

    William B. Worthen, “Modern Europe,” in The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama (Boston: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2004), 532–535.

  48. 48.

    Cormac Power, Presence in Play: A Critique of Theories of Presence in Theatre (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 6; Jane Goodall, Stage Presence (New York: Routledge, 2008).

  49. 49.

    Tait, Body Show/s: Australian Viewings of Live Performance, 3–4.

  50. 50.

    Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, 51.

  51. 51.

    Gunroe, 15.

  52. 52.

    Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, 8.

  53. 53.

    Ibid., 7.

  54. 54.

    Tait, Body Show/s: Australian Viewings of Live Performance, 2.

  55. 55.

    Stafford, War Horse: Stage Adaptation, 54–55.

  56. 56.

    Marra, “Massive Bodies in Mortal Performance: War Horse and the Staging of Anglo-American Equine Experience in Combat,” 129.

  57. 57.

    Ibid., 35.

  58. 58.

    Gunroe, “The physical theatre of war: Language, memory and gender in Black Watch and War Horse,” 65.

  59. 59.

    John O’Toole, The Process of Drama: Negotiating Art and Meaning (London: Routledge, 1992), 192.

  60. 60.

    O’Toole, The Process of Drama: Negotiating Art and Meaning, 195.

  61. 61.

    Gunroe, “The physical theatre of war: Language, memory and gender in Black Watch and War Horse,” 28.

  62. 62.

    Millar, The Horse’s Mouth: How Handspring and the National Theatre made War Horse, 21.

  63. 63.

    Marra, “Massive Bodies in Mortal Performance: War Horse and the Staging of Anglo-American Equine Experience in Combat,” 124–125.

  64. 64.

    Ibid., 124.

  65. 65.

    Ibid., 124.

  66. 66.

    Millar, The Horse’s Mouth: How Handspring and the National Theatre made War Horse, 64.

  67. 67.

    Jones and Kohler, 14.

  68. 68.

    Millar, The Horse’s Mouth: How Handspring and the National Theatre made War Horse, 60.

  69. 69.

    Malone and Jackman, Adapting War Horse, 56.

  70. 70.

    Ibid., 125.

  71. 71.

    Ibid., 127.

  72. 72.

    Marra, “Massive Bodies in Mortal Performance: War Horse and the Staging of Anglo-American Equine Experience in Combat,” 122; Malone and Jackman, Adapting War Horse, 52.

  73. 73.

    Bahktin, Mikhail. “Rebelais and his World.” In Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 686–692 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 68.

  74. 74.

    Malone and Jackman, Adapting War Horse, 52–54.

  75. 75.

    Ibid., 56.

  76. 76.

    David Barrnett, Brecht in Practice: Theatre, Theory and Performance (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014), 77.

  77. 77.

    Barrnett, Brecht in Practice: Theatre, Theory and Performance, 79.

  78. 78.

    Malone and Jackman, Adapting War Horse, 34.

  79. 79.

    Ibid., 34.

  80. 80.

    Ibid., 55.

  81. 81.

    Millar, The Horse’s Mouth: How Handspring and the National Theatre made War Horse, 70.

  82. 82.

    Jahan Ramazani, “The Great War and the Modern Imagination,” The National Journal for Literature and Discussion 68, no. 1 (1992). http://www.vqronline.org/great-war-and-modern-imagination.

  83. 83.

    Mattfeld, Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-century Masculinity and English Horsemanship, 124.

  84. 84.

    Gunroe, “The physical theatre of war: Language, memory and gender in Black Watch and War Horse,” 85.

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  1. University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia

    Janet McDonald

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Correspondence to Janet McDonald .

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  1. University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia

    Martin Kerby , Margaret Baguley  & Janet McDonald ,  & 

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McDonald, J. (2019). The Theatre of War: Rememoration and the Horse. In: Kerby, M., Baguley, M., McDonald, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Artistic and Cultural Responses to War since 1914. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96986-2_29

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96986-2_29

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