MICHAEL MORPURGO WAR HORSE WRITER
By Gary Murray
“It is all someone else’s fault really,” said writer Michael Morpurgo on the germ of the idea that created the book War Horse. He is an award-winning author of more than 100 children’s works which include The Wreck of Zanzibar, Shadow and Born to Run. In 2003, he was honored as Britain’s Children’s Laureate. In 2005, he was named Booksellers Author of the year. His story of War Horse was turned into what Michael called ‘theatrical event’ It plays at the Opera House from September 12 to 23 at the Winspear Opera House as a part of the LEXUS Broadway Series.
The path of creating War Horse was serpentine at best. Mr. Morpurgo was living in Devon in 1970s, in the west of England and met a few old men who were part of World War I. One night, at a pub, one man said that, “I was there with horses, Calvary, yeomanry.” The 85 year-old began telling details of the First World War that Michael had never come across before. Michael said, “In England, the First World War is a nation building war, much the same way the Revolutionary War is in America.”
He further explained, “I had some sense of what the war was about but here I was hearing about it for the first time by someone who has actually been there. I was profoundly moved by the language he used and by the things that he said; by his modesty and his bravery and his connection to it emotionally. He became very emotional during (the recounting of the tale).”
At some particular point, the elder statesman said to Michael that the problem with the friends he was making during the war was that he had was that they couldn’t really say anything to each other. They did a lot of banter, a lot of stories, a lot of silly nonsense but they never said anything important.
Michael remembered what the old man said about his most intimate dialogue, “I left that for conversations I had with my horse. I go to see my horse in the horse lines at night and I’d tell the horse all the things I couldn’t talk about, my fears and my longings for home. That horse was my best friend.”
Michael felt that the elder gentleman wanted to pass on his story to someone younger. “With everything he told me,” Michael said, “I went back home and thought about it and thought about it. I had to find out about these horses.”
So, he contacted the Imperial War Museum in London. “I asked them a very simple question. ‘How many horses went from these shores to the First World War?’ They said that they don’t know exactly but ‘we think a million’. Then I asked a second question: ‘How many came back?’ They said ‘65,000’.“
This was the seed that sparked the idea of War Horse. “If you accept that about 10 million soldiers died in the First World War then you have to accept that approximately the same (percentage) number of horses would have died, ” said the writer. “And they would have died the same way. They would have been torn on the wire, blown to pieces, drown in the mud, all those horrible things you don’t want to think about. So in other words, the horses and the men went through this thing together. I remember hearing that and thinking it would be interesting to write a story of one of those horses’ path through that war.”
Since there are many stories about British heroism in World War I, Michael Morpurgo had no interest in a strictly jingoistic tale. “I thought that if it’s a British horse, then it would be a British story. If it were a German horse, then it would be a German story. I didn‘t want to write yet another story which takes sides,” he said.
“If there is one thing I learned about the First World War is that it was a massacre of innocents. These were the European powers deciding to slug it out. It wasn’t a war about defending your shores but who was going to be top dog. And Europe bled itself to death in the trenches of that war. It was huge, it was senseless and it was futile. I thought ‘Don’t tell the story from one side — tell it, if you can, as a view from the horse of the universal suffering of that war on all sides because that horse can change sides’.”
In the story, the horse goes from a farm animal to the first charge of the English against the German army. He is captured by the Germans and forced to ‘switch sides’. Eventually the horse ends up in the French countryside where the animal sees the futility of battle on the people who have to endure living in the battle field. Through War Horse, Michael Morpurgo explores the greater themes of conflict or as he said, “The mess they all got themselves into, the arrogance, the pride, the greed. You can’t believe how cheap life was for some people, these (soldiers) were pawns in their game.“
He believes the theme in all of his works more as a ‘reconciliation of cultures’ . Of the process Michael said, “You can and you must write about things that matter to you.”
He never considered the book as anything other than a story he had crafted, one of the approximately 100 published. “This writer never thinks about anything (outside the story) while he’s writing a book. When you are writing a story all you have to do is believe in it, care about it and lose yourself in it completely. If you ever start thinking that you are doing it ‘for children’, or that ‘I want it to be a movie or a play’, you lose the whole plot, literally. I wrote it, it came out. It was a little bit more successful than the other books I had written before but not much more successful. It was a little bit more successful in that it was on the short list for a very big literary prize in England, but it didn’t win it. It sold between 1.000 and 2.000 copies a year for 25 years. So, publishers kept it in print but it really wasn’t doing very well. Without me arranging anything, along comes the National Theater right out of the blue.”
Tom Morris, the artistic director of the National Theater of England had been looking for a project to highlight the amazing work of the Handspring Puppets, a South African group of artists who turn puppets into some of the most amazing effects seen on a stage. For two years he had been looking for the perfect idea to meld these artists with a compelling dramatic material but to no avail.
Michael explains what happens next. “His mum hears me on the radio talking about War Horse. She goes out and buys the book and when Tom comes back for Christmas, his mum says, ‘Tom, I just read this book about a horse in the First World War by this man with an unpronounceable name and I think you should read it. It could be just the thing you are looking for, for the play you are always going on about.’ Luckily, Tom did what his mum said and loved the book.’
“A week later he rings me up and says ‘What do you think about having War Horse on the National Theater stage?” I said ‘Yes’. Then he says ‘With puppets.’ I thought that you have got to be joking. This is a serious story, not with puppets. He said, ‘Come out to London and I will show you something you will never forget.’ I went out to London and I saw a little video of a giraffe which Handspring Puppets had made. I saw it walking across the stage with three men inside it and within seconds I knew that this was something unbelievably special. If they could do it with a giraffe, they could most certainly do it with a horse. I thought let’s go for it.”
The play War Horse was in workshop performances for two years where it was full every night. “People were completely blown away by the puppetry, by the music, by the design,” said Michael. “They liked the story but actually what it is, it’s the whole (experience). Across the generations, (War Horse) resonates for them deeply, it moves people beyond belief. I don’t think it is a play at all, it is not a musical. It is sort of a theatrical event that seems to be cross generational.” The play eventually moved to a larger venue in the heart of the British theater district.
During the three year run in the West End of London, Kathleen Kennedy, Steven Spielberg’s producer, caught the show and contacted the director. Within 4 months, the story was in front of the cameras and on to Oscar nominations. On all this success, Michael Morpurgo said, “I have nothing to do it with all at all, it just happens. I’m just a lucky man.”
“I have written a so many books that have not been successful,” he said, “that are not in print. All books begin with this little germ and that’s all it is, some little seed. You grow it where you can grow it. Something happens like this and is as unlikely as this, it never stops being a surprise. I wake up every morning sort of pinching myself.”
“I’ll tell you what is really lovely,” he said of becoming an over night success decades in the making, “is that people now all over the world know about the story where as before no one had ever heard of the book. It spent twenty weeks at the top of the New York Times Best Seller list and did the same in England and it is all around the world. Now I get letters from people all around the world about their grand daddies who went to the First World War.” He called it that sprinkle of magic dust that falls on a project.
“Essentially,” he summed up about War Horse and its incarnations, “this is a love story. It is a story about a boy who loves a horse and a horse who loves a boy. At its simplest that is what it is. And I’m sure at bottom that is what resonates with people. Whether or not the reconciliation message is something that people will go with. I believe they will. It is something that we all deeply want. We all want to find solutions that don’t involve war. We are very bad at doing that but most of us that is what we want.”
He finished the interview by saying, “I think that Americans see War Horse not as a First World War story at all but they do see it as a story of a horse and a boy against the background of a war, and it could be any war. I don’t think they are thinking this is a story about the First World War, they think it is a story of conflict, the sadness of conflict. The audience long for these two (that) they identify with to come through. Right or wrong, we all feel the suffering that war causes. The other thing it does is perpetuate anger. For an audience anywhere, it is a love story and I think it is a story about hope and reconciliation and that resonates anywhere. That is what you are left with in the end. These are the innocent victims.”
