War Horse

Lincoln Center

New York

(212) 239-6200

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

***

A contraption of leather, fabric, cane, and wire, this show’s equine star is “so full of life that you’d swear he had a soul,” said Marilyn Stasio in Variety. In this rousing import from London, Joey is a farm boy’s beloved horse, sold to the British cavalry during World War I. Though the horse is manipulated by three visible actor-puppeteers, it’s easy to forget that he’s the creation of South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company, not flesh and blood. Joey’s movements—every breath, step, twitch, and jump—are “both dramatically dynamic and incredibly subtle.” It’s thus heartbreaking to see Joey and a pack of other beautiful cavalry horses rendered tragically useless by the battlefield’s “nightmarish landscape” of barbed wire, tanks, and automatic machine guns.

Those harrowing scenes elevate what “might otherwise have registered as only an agreeable children’s entertainment,” said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. Adapted from a 1982 young-adult novel by Michael Morpurgo, the show made children and adults alike “soak their handkerchiefs” when it premiered in 2007 at London’s National Theatre. Judging by the audible sobbing in the packed house on its opening night at Lincoln Center, it’s having a similar effect in New York. Yet it’s precisely the play’s heavy-handed, tear-jerking tendencies that detract from the show’s “exquisite visual surface.” It’s hard not to be moved by the bond between a 16-year-old boy and his horse, or the horrors of the Great War. But must the story keep pushing emotional buttons “like a sales clerk in a notions shop?”

“Is War Horse too sentimental? Perhaps,” said Richard Zoglin in Time. But its sentimentality is bolstered by “sheer storytelling brio.” Beyond its main drama, the show packs in “nuanced family drama; lucid, large-scale military history; and a close-up picture of men in battle that rivals” the best that have been staged. In a Broadway landscape that tends to display all too little imagination, this is “a landmark theater event.”