![]() The puppet that represents Joey is operated by three puppeteers each night: one at the head, one at the heart, and one at the hind. “Because the audience has to put as much investment as we do on stage in believing the horse is real, I think they get quite a magical experience when, after a while, they forget that the puppeteers are there,” says Jo Castleton, who plays Rose Narracott in the international touring version coming to Australia. It was turned into a successful movie by Stephen Spielberg in 2011, but the real horse who played Joey in the film couldn’t quite compete with the emotional tug of the puppet version, designed by South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company. It’s been a massively successful endeavour: the National Theatre’s 2007 staging is one of the most profitable productions of a play ever, playing long London and New York seasons and touring the world. Over two and a half hours, the play follows Joey’s journey from a peaceful existence in rural England with his young owner, Albert, to the darkest and most violent corners of Europe at the height of World War I. In War Horse, the National Theatre of Great Britain’s globe-conquering adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s novel, a devoted group of actors ask audiences every night to believe that a cane frame covered in stretched fabric is a real-life horse called Joey, the protagonist of the play. It’s called the “suspension of disbelief”, and it can be especially powerful when artists invite their audience to invest in an idea that really stretches their imaginative power. There’s a certain kind of magic that happens in theatre when an audience chooses to believe in something they cognitively understand isn’t real.
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