In the hit Broadway and West End play War Horse, Joey – a Devon farm horse brought to uncanny life through cutting-edge puppetry – is sold to the British cavalry and sent off to fight for the Empire in the First World War.
And, in a way, the lovable puppet horse is being shipped out on a similar mission today – leading the charge for Britain's new theatrical empire.
With Joey galloping into Toronto's Princess of Wales Theatre this month, War Horse is just the most prominent of an increasing number of initiatives bringing Britain's National Theatre to international audiences – particularly to those in English-speaking, former British colonies.
In what could be considered a friendlier version of imperialism, the National is transferring its most popular shows overseas (such as the Tony winner The History Boys and the upcoming a new comedy One Man, Two Guvnors), as well as broadcasting to movie theatres around the world, then funnelling the revenues back home to maintain and expand its not-for-profit operations in Britain at a time of government arts cuts.
Reached over the phone at the National's headquarters on London's South Bank, executive director Nick Starr says he hadn't considered the colonial comparison. “The dying light of the Empire, you mean?” he asks with a laugh.
“Honestly, give us something, please. The euro zone on the point of break-up, double-dip recession looming.… Please allow us, at least, to share our theatre with you.”
War Horse, which opens officially in Toronto on Feb. 28, co-produced by Mirvish Productions and Broadway impresario Bob Boyett, has been an incredible financial success for the National, indeed the biggest since it was founded in 1963 under artistic director Laurence Olivier.
In the 2010-2011 financial year, Joey's box office accounted for 20 per cent of the National's £70.6-million income (the other 21 productions that season together accounted for 28 per cent). The War Horse war chest will only increase in the next annual report, now that an additional Broadway production has opened, recouped its approximately $6-million (U.S.) investment and is selling anywhere from $800,000 to $1-million in tickets a week.
The show's commercial success couldn't have come at a better time for the National, as the recession has led to belt-tightening by the U.K. government. “We were lucky enough that the move to the West End [in 2009] came along at the same time as the arts council cuts,” notes Starr, who estimates the impact of reduced public funding to the theatre at around £3-million a year.
(Even after cuts, however, the National remains better subsidized than any Canadian theatre of similar size. The Stratford Shakespeare Festival, for example, gets only about 6 per cent of its budget from governments, while the National gets approximately 28 per cent of its budget from the Arts Council of England.)
While War Horse has become a cash cow – and is being touted as an example of how arts organizations might weather cutbacks – it began as the kind of pie-in-the-sky project that its creators claim could only be born in a subsidized setting that allows artists to take risks.
Director Tom Morris, who has an experimental theatre background, first came up with the idea of adapting Michael Morpurgo's book of the same name with the help of South Africa's Handspring Puppet Company back in 2005.
National Theatre's artistic director Nicholas Hytner wasn't entirely sold, however, so he only committed to an exploratory workshop at the NT Studio – a kind of research-and-development arm that few theatre companies can afford.
Morris describes the Studio as “a series of empty rooms with a budget that allows creative teams to play around with ideas away from the commercial realities of producing theatre.” It was here, over the course of a couple of years and several workshops, that Morris, choreographer Toby Sedgwick and Handspring's Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones began to develop “an untested theatrical language” that would permit a horse who couldn't speak to be the main character in a play.
