Last day in England. Slept in instead of going to Parliament with some friends, but nobody ended up going, so I was glad to get that extra hour of sleep. Besides, I had two shows to see today, and now I’m almost too tired to write this.

Everybody else in the group went to the Mozart Requiem at St. Martin’s-in-the-Field. Because I was an excitable idiot and booked tickets before this was added to the schedule, I went to War Horse instead.

Until today I hadn’t seen a Shakespeare play without having read it first. It was nice, though, because I was watching it as an actual play and didn’t know what was going to happen next. Henry V had great energy among the entire cast, and it was easy to follow for someone who hadn’t read the play. Actors who gave particularly energetic performances were Ron Cook as Pistol, Noma Dumezweni as Mistress Quickly, and Ben Lloyd-Hughes as Dauphin, who crackled every time they were on stage. The set was tall and wooden, versatile enough for all of the scenes and looking historic. I sat eight rows from the stage near the center and got quite a nice view, nothing obstructed.

Jude Law’s acting prowess goes without saying. He blended quite nicely with the rest of the cast without taking focus away, and his intentions with Henry were incredibly clear. At the beginning he played Henry as rather aloof and complacent, certainly not a kind and benevolent king. (He is said to pay little attention to the will of his subjects.) Later in the play when he fights alongside common soldiers, he becomes aware of the will of the common man and is humbled by this experience. All this he made apparent through voice and facial expressions. One of my favorite moments of his was in Act 3, Scene VI: “We are in God’s hand, brother, not in theirs./March to the bridge; it now draws toward night:/Beyond the river we’ll encamp ourselves,/And on to-morrow, bid them march away.” Everybody exited except for Henry, who looked briefly skyward. I thought a soliloquy would follow, but instead he left the stage, as well. Then came Intermission. It was more powerful than any monologue.

My favorite instance of staging came in Act 4, Scene I, wherein Henry disguised himself as a commoner and talked to one of his soldiers, Williams. All this took place downstage right. Williams, not knowing he was talking to the King, said that if this war was unjust, the king had a heavy reckoning. As he was saying this, Henry’s hood was pulled low over his head, but his head was lifted making visible stricken look in his eyes. That was a perfect moment when everything in the production force, especially actor and director, came together. And, of course, it was nice to see Henry bathed in white light upstage center every so often. Whether or not this was ironic was left up to the audience.

The one thing I didn’t like about this was that the chorus, or narrator, was dressed in modern clothing… jeans and a T-shirt with the British flag, as well as a backpack. When he opened the play I actually wondered if it was going to be a modern interpretation. (It wasn’t.) This would have been fine if he hadn’t conversed and been involved in the action with other characters who were dressed from the period. That really threw me off.

Of course, the play itself was wonderfully thought-provoking. First Henry V seemed anti-war with a discussion about just war and Henry’s developing empathy for his soldiers, but Henry’s war ended in victory and wasn’t considered to be unjust. Yet he reacted with grief to France’s dead as well as to England’s (though England’s losses were far smaller). All in all it seemed to state that war isn’t to be taken lightly, but sometimes it is necessary. I didn’t really agree that fighting a war over inheritance was just. Perhaps I should have adjusted to the context of that particular time, the fourteenth century, but pacifism lives so strongly in me that it’s difficult to do so.

Lastly, I was quite thrown off when everybody didn’t die at the end.

Now on to War Horse.

30 seconds in I was already on the verge of tears, so as one can imagine I did a lot of crying… maybe even more than I did when I saw Les Mis in 2011, since then I didn’t start tearing up until ten or fifteen minutes in as I recall. But the music and the light on foal Joey, bringing him to life, were so moving that I really couldn’t help myself. Besides, I was sitting in the front row, which really acted as an immersing power. I felt like I was there.

War Horse is sort of like Hair in that I never want to see either movie ever again after seeing the play. Real horses, no matter how well-controlled, really can’t compare to the ingenious use of puppetry here. Spielberg gave it his best shot, and it was okay, but War Horse really isn’t adaptable to the screen. The only thing that might (possibly) have been better about the movie was John Williams’ score, and even then I was really only impressed with his three-minute “Reunion” theme.

That isn’t to say that the music wasn’t well done. A lot of it was performed on stage, with one man or the whole ensemble singing folk tunes. That was moving in its own way.

I’d place the staging right up there with Wicked‘s “Defying Gravity” sequence, my favorite example of which coming from the first act, when a silhouette Albert is riding Joey on the backdrop fades to the actual Albert riding Joey in place below it, under white light. The rotating part of the stage was also used quite well, in act one to show Albert, Joey’s owner, training Joey to plow (with more folk music) and in act two to show Albert riding Joey in slow motion. Another great slow motion moment was shown with the war horses’ final dying movements: they tossed their necks up and down before stilling forever, and this was quite an emotional moment in the play. And then another director choice I liked was placing the trench soldiers were between the stage and first row, to my right and left.

The best parts were when Joey, the puppet horse, looked me in the eyes, or when he came close enough for me to reach out and touch him. Also when Joey and Topthorn appeared to jump over me at the act one finale.

My favorite performance in the show was by Ian Shaw as Friedrich Mueller. He definitely brought the torment of losing those he loved to war, and I truly felt for him in the moments he was conflicted between duty and morals.

Thank goodness for high school German, really, because I understood all of the German here. Too bad I don’t know any French.

The beginning of the program talks about the use and mistreatment of horses in the World Wars. We tend to think only about the human casualties, myself included, I’m ashamed to say. For all that I try to do against animal cruelty, I’m rather ill-informed about matters such as these.