It takes three actors to manipulate the life-size horse in the play War Horse. (Photo by Jiang Dong/China Daily)
The thing about a war horse is that those who are keen to hold its reins need to be at absolute peace with one another.
Tommy Luther, a puppet show director, has long been convinced of that truth, and 16 months ago, when his mother asked him what he was looking for in casting characters for the play War Horse in China, his reply was swift.
"The puppeteers must have the ability to work well in a team, the sensibility to listen to one another, to be able to follow each other's suggestions, signals, ideas as well as to offer their own ideas, to lead sometimes."
That's all well and good, but having puppeteers who understand one another is as useful as a horse with just rear legs; they must also understand horses.
So all puppeteers performing in War Horse have the handbook titled How to Think Like a Horse. They also live on a farm for two weeks observing how horses move, breathe and think.
The play is based on a children's novel by Michael Morpurgo. It was first performed by the National Theatre of Britain at the Olivier Theatre in London in 2007 before it moved to the West End nearly two years later.
Luther, sticking rigidly to the ground rules he set on personal interaction, whittled a field of 1,000 applicants for roles as puppeteers to 19, and they have spent the past year training and rehearsing. Whether his high expectations on their human sense of purpose and their equine prowess have been met will become clear to audiences in Beijing when War Horse is performed from Sept 4 to Oct 31.
The Hollywood filmmaker Steven Spielberg turned the World War I story about an English farm boy Albert and his beloved horse Joey into a movie of the same title in 2011. It became a box-office success and was nominated for six Oscar Awards, including for best picture.
Li Dong, a producer with the National Theater of China, says he first watched the play at the West End in August 2011 and was so impressed that he decided to bring it to China.
Two years later he returned to London to talk about a collaboration between the National Theater of China and the National Theatre of Britain and firmed up a proposal to make a Chinese version of War Horse, which has been staged in English, German and Dutch.
The biggest challenge for anyone putting on the play is coming to grips with the life-sized horse puppet created for it by the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa. It takes three actors to manipulate the 2.4-meters-tall horse, weighing 54 kilograms.
In January last year, the Chinese co-directors Wang Tingting and Liu Dan, the puppetry director Liu Xiaoyi and a team of technicians went to London to learn how to stage the play.
