076 VENUE


Photo by Paul Kolnik


to change a sequence at the beginning. Basically the director wants the swallows to come onstage later. We use the swallows as a way to distract the audience so they don’t notice the little horse getting into position. If that sequence has to be later then the horse reveal has to be later, which has an impact on when the score starts playing and so on... One little rehearsal note like that can affect everything - it’s a house of cards!” However this complex inter-relationship of creative elements is not always obvious initially. In the main, lighting changes are subtle. Much of it is about following time, sometimes in the minutiae and sometimes through the seasons and the years. The contrast between light and dark ensures that the audience never quite become aware of what’s going on in the darkness. If they did the premise of the show falls apart. “Much of the show is quite dark because there’s so much of the space that we don’t want the audience to see - it’s sleight of hand not big, scenic gestures,” explains Constable. Light comes from the dark spaces and the audience struggle to see beyond it.” This is particularly effective when Joey the foal becomes Joey the adult horse in a magical, live transformation that causes the audience to gasp every time. This is despite the fact that the big horse gets into the transformation position in direct view of the audience. They don’t see it because they’re not looking for it. “Keeping that ball in the air throughout the show is one of our biggest challenges. If the audience start to see too much of anything the magic is lost very quickly,” reveals Constable. Everything about the show is also stripped back yet somehow the audience becomes emotionally engaged very quickly. Yes you can


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see all the lighting equipment and the theatrical process clearly, yet somehow everyone forgets about it and surrenders themselves to the world of the War Horse - this is real theatre, brilliant story telling, emotional illustration - genius. So engaging was it that there were times when the audience had to look away - scenes were too emotional, too raw to watch, the death scene of Topthorn or when Joey gets caught up in the barbed wire - both are absolutely harrowing scenes. The show is testing at times, the horror of war is there for all to see, it’s emotionally exhausting yet also hugely satisfying. The piece has clearly been born from a tightly worked collaboration; no creative element sits separate from another - was this important to Paule? “Yes, I felt it was amazing that I was having a conversation with a producer who was interested in who was actually in the room. He was saying: ‘I don’t know how we’re going to do this but whatever we do it’s got to be collaborative, and unlike anything we’ve done before’.” It took shape through workshops and the space the team worked in. “We didn’t hide from the theatre machine that surrounded us. The thing about the Olivier is that it can never be passive. Some people like to stuff it full of scenery and I feel that’s a real mistake,” says Constable. “You need to go back to the Greek idea of a simple storytelling space. The thing that’s so brilliant about the set design is the projected surface that hovers across the full span of the stage. Sometimes the sky, sometimes a cloud, it creates a human space and at the same time very subtly controls the audience’s eye line.” It’s a process that has seen each creative element intrinsically intertwined with the others - the set, action, score, soundscape, lighting, costume, puppets, performances, characterisation - in such


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