“War Horse” at the Olivier, National Theatre
Franco Milazzo on the South Bank
★★★★☆
4 June 2026
Listen very carefully, I shall say this only once: if you can look past the French and German accents that makes ’Allo ’Allo look like found footage, an anti-war message with all the subtlety of a 4 a.m. car alarm, and characters so wafer-thin that they give wafers a bad name, then War Horse still holds up as an uplifting night out. Albeit for one major reason: its imaginative use of puppetry.
Anita Adam Gabay.
Photo credit: Brinkhoff/Moegenburg.
This staggeringly successful play, based on Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 novel, is having a homecoming of sorts. The numbers are hard to argue with: nearly two decades after its Olivier debut, it has played to over 8.8 million people worldwide, won more than 25 major awards including the Tony for Best Play, and become the most commercially successful production in the National Theatre’s history. It gallops back to the South Bank following a sell-out UK and Ireland tour, created by original co-director Tom Morris and revival director Katie Henry; the latter also took the reins for the tenth anniversary and 1918 Armistice centenary productions.
But if there is one overriding reason to return to this play, it resides in an aspect of theatre that critics have long condescended to without ever quite bringing themselves to celebrate. It’s there front and centre in My Neighbour Totoro, which broke box-office records at the Barbican and carried off six Oliviers including Best Director for Phelim McDermott. It’s there in Avenue Q, a ludicrously adult comedy back in the West End for its own 20th anniversary run (fun fact: in 2004, it walked off with the Tony for Best Musical ahead of Wicked). It’s a winning feature of the recently opened Beetlejuice The Musical and a vital one of another Olivier winner, Life of Pi.
The South African Handspring Puppet Company’s contributions take the form of two vast horses – plus a scene-stealing goose – built from steel, leather, and aircraft cable. Joey is the bay thoroughbred Albert (Tom Sturgess) falls in love with after his father (Stephen Beckett) impulsively wins him at auction, then sells him to a cavalry officer for £100 (around £13,300 today). Joey ships off to France for the early days of what we now know as the First World War; Albert, only 16 and too young to enlist, signs up anyway and heads after him.
Nicholas Khan and Stephen Beckett.
Photo credit: Brinkhoff-Moegenburg.
The middle and final acts intercut two narratives. After Albert’s cavalry unit is practically wiped out charging into barbed wire and machine guns, Joey and the black thoroughbred Topthorn are captured and put to brutal use hauling heavy war machinery. Meanwhile Albert, having befriended a fellow soldier named David (Ike Bennett), trudges across enemy territory in search of his horse.
The writing shows benefits and suffers from having been lifted wholesale from a children’s book. Unlike productions that take heavy liberties with their source material, Stafford’s adaptation stays close to Morpurgo’s instincts, and those instincts are not without value. The play takes care to distribute humanity across both sides of the wire: cruel officers and decent ones, those who relish the killing and those simply following orders, appear in British khaki and German grey alike. In a cultural moment when nationalities beyond our borders are increasingly painted in binary terms, that even-handedness – particularly in a show aimed at all ages – is no small thing. The cost is subtext, which is sorely missing, and any sense of interiority: events canter along like horses on the last furlong of the Grand National, and every character, once established, remains exactly who they appeared to be.
But none of that is really the point. Puppets on the British stage are still largely deemed fare for small children and given approximately the respect owed to a party entertainer. War Horse, Totoro, Life of Pi, Avenue Q, Beetlejuice – taken together, they make a compelling case not just for more shows that use puppetry, but for the theatre world to invest in it at every level: training puppeteers properly, commissioning writers who might look at the form in a fresh light, and eventually, perhaps, treating it as the discipline it is rather than the novelty it’s assumed to be.
