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Trotting It Out Again

A “War Horse” in theatrical parlance is a show that is broadly familiar and broadly popular, one that you can always trot out to reasonable success without having to think too much about it. There’s a joke that you can always tell when a Shakespeare company has had a bad season, because the next year […]

A “War Horse” in theatrical parlance is a show that is broadly familiar and broadly popular, one that you can always trot out to reasonable success without having to think too much about it. There’s a joke that you can always tell when a Shakespeare company has had a bad season, because the next year they’ll programMacbethandA Midsummer Night’s Dream, two of Shakespeare’s most reliable war horses (thoughMacbethis actually quite tricky to do well).

War Horse, now showing at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre and at theatres around the English-speaking world has already proven itself to have a prophetic title; this is a show that, no doubt, will run forever, and if it weren’t so complex to stage it would play everywhere.

But if we think of conceptual building-blocks of productions as “war horses” in their own right – familiar and popular signifiers – then I have to wonder about the use of the Great War in theatre today. World War I is no longer a living memory, and neither is the civilization that was ended by that war. When we use the war onstage today, it’s not to make a direct political point about the meaning of that conflict. It is a signifier, for us, of “the pity of war” – of war not as the crucible of nobility but as an ignoble meat grinder into which we fools dump the most noble among us. It is, in other words, the signifier of the sentimental mentality behind the phrase, “I’m against the war, but I support the troops.”

This is a mentality that we badly need get away from in the English-speaking world. War is a part of our world – a routine part. The United States has ongoing military operations around the world, and the United Kingdom and Canada frequently operate alongside or in support of American forces. The pace of operations may accelerate or moderate; the engagements may be more or less ferocious, and more or less foolish, but there are no signs that we will be at “peace” any time in the foreseeable future. Our theatre doesn’t have to condemn this reality, nor does it have to applaud it – indeed, the strongest art doesn’t generally take as its starting point a kind of ideological “take” of this sort, Brecht’s theories notwithstanding. But our theatre has to reckon with it.

Shows likeWar Horsemake us feel good. We love the horse, and we love the boy who loves him. We fear for their safety, and we hate the forces that put them into danger. We are relieved when they survive – and if they died we would be outraged. But neither emotion – relief or outrage – is productive of any kind of understanding of our world, our life. We feel like we’ve gone through a dramatic experience, but it’s a pseudo experience because we do not know something at the end that we did not know at the beginning.

There’s some dispute about whether Aristotle’s “catharsis” was supposed to apply to the protagonist or to the audience – whether it is the protagonist who is to be “purged” or “cleansed” by the experience of the tragedy and the knowledge that comes with it, or whether it is we, in the audience, who are supposed to have that experience. But I think this is ultimately a dispute about nothing, because Aristotle’s conception of theatre is notcritical- we’re not alienated from the experience taking place onstage, but carried along with it. But we’re carried along for a purpose. If the protagonist undergoes catharsis, we undergo it along with him.

There is no catharsis in a show likeWar Horse. It’s a spectacle, and as such it’s marvelous – witty, charming, breathtaking, terrifying. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. It’s better thanCats.

But theatrical experiences like these, far from expanding our emotional horizons, broadening our empathy, do the opposite. Precisely because they flatter us with the most comforting experiences, they encourage us in our aversion to theatrical experiences that are less-comfortable.

That’s not really a knock on War Horse. It is what it is, and it really is stunning to behold. It’s a knock, if anything, on the use of War Horse-esque signification in more serious theatrical productions. Using, for example, a World War I-era setting for a classical play to “signify” a certain relationship between war and nobility. Once an event has become as thoroughly sentimentalized as World War I has, continued use of that event as a signifier will give access only to sentimentalized emotion, not to the real thing. What you think you’re doing to bring the audience in is actually keeping them at a safe and comfortable distance.

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