Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

134 Chapter 5 Designers and Technicians
War Horse astonished audiences in London and then in New York by the giant projections of World War I battlefields
designed by 59 Productions, and by the amazing, full-sized, puppet horses created by Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler. The
New York production won 2011 Tony Awards for Best Play, Best Direction, and Best Scenic, Lighting and Sound Design—but
audiences left the theatre thinking mainly about the magnificent horses and the stunning projected images. © Simon Annand
continents. Designed, fabricated, and directed by Basil
Jones and Adrian Kohler of the Handspring Puppet
Company, they are controlled by expertly trained crews
operating from within their horse’s skeletal frames,
which are seen to prance, gallop, whinny, and rise up
on their back feet throughout the production. The effect
is certainly spectacular, but what is particularly surprising
is that after a few minutes of admiring the technology,
the audience settles back and begins to forget that
the “horses” are puppets and to imagine them instead
as real animals. They then empathize with their feelings,
and with the feelings of the characters who love
them. And when the horses “die” at the end of the play,
many a grown adult in the audience wipes tears from
their eyes. Puppets are more than an addition or feature
of theatre: they tap into one of the primal powers of
performance—the ability for an audience to treat a
clearly artificial construction as a deeply human reality
(or an animal reality, as the case may be). An open display
of theatrical mechanics, we discover, can heighten
rather than distract from the intellectual and emotional
thrust of the play being performed. Once again, we see
the Brechtian idea of making the mechanics of the theatre
part of the show instead of hidden behind the curtains
or proscenium—and this is no longer considered an
avant-garde technique, but rather a part of the theatre’s
mainstream.
PROJECTIONS
Projections were not possible until the development of
the steady beam of focused, incandescent, electric light.
But by the 1920s, German designer Erwin Piscator was
experimenting with projected images as part of his scenic
design, while his colleague Bertolt Brecht projected
titles on screens to indicate the location (e.g., “A highway
cutting through barren fields” in his Mother Courage)
or show supplementary material (e.g., historical maps
and documents in his Galileo). In America, Tennessee
Williams called for “a screen on which were projected