dinner and a show

So then - war horse on Saturday night. How was it?

Well, truth be told it was okay. If I'm brutally honest I was keener on the (and I'm not sure this is the exact word for it) stagecraft than I was the actual play.

See, the title of the play pretty much tells you what one of the big features of the story is - horses. But, being a play, you couldn't very well rely on having actual horses in the show, not least of all because the horses in the story need to play proper 'parts', rather than just be there.

This was achieved by having puppet horses, which were actually control by three separate performers. If you imagine a classic pantomime horse, with a buy at the front and one in the rear of the costume, and then add someone else to control the head and take the whole thing through the technological equivalent of going from the stone age to the IT age, then that's roughly the idea.

But there's also all sorts of other clever staging things, like a tank and a scene stealing goose. And what I found most remarkable was the fact that even though you could see the people operating these things, it still very much 'worked'. I mean, I wouldn't say it ever got to the stage that you forgot the people were there, but there was enough cleverness and the performance side of things was so strong you were able to suspend just enough disbelief for it to really work.

And the play itself was okay. I'd been told it was a bit sad and weepy and I can kinda see where people were coming from, but I didn't find it that bad. Perhaps it's one of those where if you're expecting it to be really sad then that sort of undermines it, as it were.

As for the rest of the evening that went okay. The idea was we were having dinner before the shows and unfortunately some people were rather late - to the tune of us starting nearly an hour late. That ended up meaning that we basically had the main course and desert in a really compressed fashion, which wasn't ideal. I mean, it was good that they were willing to be quick for us, but it didn't really enhance the dining experience.

But the food was okay and luckily I ended up with the people who I know. as mentioned last week, there were partners and a few people I don't know that well coming along, so there was the distinct possibility of ending up sat amongst people I couldn't talk to.