The puppet regime

Joey the War Horse comes home at last this summer. Carlos Amato meets the South African duo behind the steed who stormed the world

Dangling from a hook in Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones's studio in Kalk Bay is a horse that Kohler built when he was about 14, back in the '60s. It looks a bit like Jolly Jumper, the cartoon cowboy Lucky Luke's mount: frozen in cheeriness, with an outsized muzzle and buttony eyes.

This gormless nag is a world away from Joey, the protagonist of War Horse. But his hock and fetlock joints are finely engineered, and there is a faint husk of suspended life in him.

Nearby, a disembodied wooden hand proffers itself as the handle of a pull-cord light switch. Hanging on the wall behind it is an array of hardware, each item occupying a stencilled place: planes, pliers, chisels, mallets, drill bits, hacksaws, set squares. A Promethean tool kit.

Kohler and Jones, the directors of the Handspring Puppet Company, were acknowledged masters of the form before the National Theatre commissioned them to work on War Horse in 2005.

But the two South Africans, partners in life and work, restored puppetry's long-lost mass appeal by building Joey, who is arguably the most compelling puppet in modern stage history.

War Horse, touring South Africa at last this summer, has been seen by six million people and counting. The source of the play is Michael Morpurgo's 1982 novel for young adults, narrated by a lion-hearted Devonshire farm horse who is hurled into the hell of the Great War. But the source of its artistic and commercial triumph is Jones and Kohler's alchemical feel for generating the illusion - even the presence - of animal consciousness within a contraption of wood, cane, nylon and humans.

That sequence of materials may sound dismissive of the creative power of the puppeteers. But the erasure of their identity is in some measure the secret of that power.

For a toddler, the act of manipulating a puppet is an exertion of control over the world: a flexing of will and ego. But the will and egos of the three people manipulating Joey - his head, heart and hind - must be scattered into the bones of their beast.

"Group mind is really what you're looking for," says Jones, as we wait for our fried hake and chips at Kalky's, down the road from their house. "In microgroups of three. But you're also looking for group mind across the cast. When that happens, a crackle of electricity goes across the stage. It doesn't happen all the time. But it's incredible to witness when it does.

"With the horse, it happens fairly often. It takes on a completely different life that has nothing to do with the people manipulating it. It's a kind of possession."

Kohler says: "Sometimes they don't know who originated a movement. You would imagine it's always the head, but the heart of the horse controls the breathing of the horse, so there's a certain amount of emotion that resides there. But there is no hierarchy."

In a sense, the audience commands the moment of possession: we are primordially wired to grant sentience to puppets. Place a paper hat on a boiled potato, for example, and you may suddenly find yourself slightly less inclined to eat it.

War Horse pushes that voodoo moment to its limits, compelling us to occupy an animal conscripted into the heart of human darkness. The arrival of the grown Joey sends a gril of awe across the auditorium. Disbelief is not so much suspended as stampeded.

That effect is hellishly hard to achieve in performance, despite our impulse to believe and the sophistication of the puppet designs. There's no room for mere competence. Just the casting of each puppeteer is a nine-hour ordeal, directed by Jones and Kohler. In three sessions of three hours each - an audition, then two call-backs - 100 elite actors, puppeteers and dancers do battle for 12 roles. Contenders must prove their rhythm, sensitivity and toughness.

Manipulating Joey is so physically strenuous that two teams alternate, performing every other night. If a puppeteer is injured or sick, the entire team sits out: the intrusion of one understudy would puncture the group mind.

Richard Vorster, a farmer's son from Graaff-Reinet and the only South African in the touring cast, landed the prized role of manipulating Joey's head. "The hardest physical thing for me is the sheer stamina needed to hold your arm high above your head for the better part of two hours. The hind has to squat a lot, so his triceps and legs take massive punishment. The heart's arms, chest and back have to be extremely strong."

Once cast, each puppeteer gets two weeks of arduous training, followed by eight weeks of rehearsal. But the refinement never stops.

Vorster must articulate the mind of his Joey through the fine emotional semaphore of his ears, and the supporting texts of the neck and head. Along with his two comrades, he must also voice Joey, using nickers, neighs, screams, snorts and rumbles.

"Sometimes in my everyday life, my exclamations come out as horse noises," says Vorster. "And in my dreams, Joey goes on stage and I'm not there, and I wonder how he's doing without me."

DURING our interview, Jones notices an impromptu play above us: a chip-seeking seagull is marching about on the awning over the Kalky's deck, its cartoonish feet performing shadow puppetry through the canvas. He and Kohler are delighted by this for fully half a minute. Their work is all about seeing and recreating such tiny dramas: the retrieval of story from the noise of the world.

As Jones writes in an essay called Puppetry and Authorship: "Apparently minor quotidian functions, like getting out of bed in the morning, or reaching for a cup just beyond one's grasp, or avoiding the clash of spectacles when kissing a friend, can take on epic proportions when performed by a puppet. Audiences identify with this and feel a resonance with their own interaction with the world. The puppet, therefore, becomes the manifest incarnation of our own struggle to live, to be human, to act."

Jones is Handspring's executive producer. He is regally observant and cerebral. Kohler, the artistic director, is garrulous, with a goofy laugh and a salty Eastern Cape accent. Both have the uncomplicated confidence of people whose success has been properly earned.

They met at UCT's Michaelis School of Fine Art in the '70s, where Kohler irritated his professors by building puppets, as he had done since childhood. "Technique and naturalistic representation was completely out then - it was the minimalist period."

He had picked up the bug from his mother, an amateur puppeteer. His father, a cabinetmaker and yachtbuilder, built the family a theatre in their house in Red House, a village near Port Elizabeth. "I learnt from handbooks in primary school. The classic design of a puppet is always available to me, and I always refer to it."

At Michaelis, Jones wasn't wild about puppetry. But in 1978, during the couple's stint in Botswana to avoid military service, they encountered a mysterious Malian puppet with internal rod controls. Both Jones and Kohler were thrilled at the potential of drawing on Mali's vision of the form. Kohler's previous work had been the Western marionette tradition and Japan's bunraku theatre, in which the manipulator is exposed to the audience.

Inspired, they returned home, bought a truck with savings from academic jobs in Botswana, and started Handspring with two friends. Initially they paid the bills with children's plays, but in the late '80s and '90s Handspring churned out a sequence of experimental plays for adults, notably in collaboration with William Kentridge and Jane Taylor. Woyzeck on the Highveld, Faustus in Africa, Ubu and the Truth Commission, The Chimp Project, Zeno at 4am, Il Retorno d'Ulisse: each was a radically inventive stew of puppetry, animation, high literature and dark questions.

They toured abroad, but the form was very unsexy in the Anglo-Saxon theatre world. "'Puppet' was like the 'k' word in theatre for a time," says Jones. "Puppet companies even changed their names to 'movement groups' or 'object animators'.

"But we always knew it had a power, even though we didn't know why. Only after years of reflection did we begin to understand it, when we stepped off stage and wrote a book about our work (Handspring Puppet Company, David Krut). "We call a puppet an emotional prosthesis - a dead mechanism through which you pour all your emotions and technique. It's about belief in an object. The belief that it can be as good as you."

Janni Younge, a former director at Handspring, says Kohler has an extraordinary eye. "The French call it exigence - a commitment to quality and refined detail. No detail is ever too much for Adrian: even things you can't see from a metre away, never mind from the auditorium. In bunraku theatre, there are ways you're allowed to pick up a puppet. You sweep the floor before you put its feet on it. There's something similar in Adrian's work: an extreme care for the object. People don't consciously see this care, but they feel it. It's all the more powerful for being unconscious."

A pivotal show was Tall Horse, staged in collaboration with the Sogolon Puppet Troupe of Mali in 2004. The hero was a giraffe given to the King of France by the Pasha of Egypt in the 1820s.

At the time, the UK's National Theatre needed to rejuvenate a fast-greying audience. Its director, Nicholas Hytner, needed a puppet company to interpret War Horse, adapted for the stage by Nick Stafford. Hytner saw Tall Horse and asked Jones and Kohler to experiment at the National Theatre Studio, a superbly equipped incubator on the West End.

"Nick watched our first rehearsal after our third workshop," says Kohler, "and he saw that explosive moment in which the grown Joey appears. You could feel the green light going on in his head.

"But still, we didn't know it would be a hit. In its first preview, the show was three-and-a-half hours long. People were falling asleep. So Hytner came in and said to the directors: This is my list of cuts. And they said: OK, thank you, we'll consider it. And he said: No you won't. You WILL cut them. He cut 90 minutes. And suddenly it started working."

A slight understatement, that. Since the West End, War Horse has hit Broadway, Toronto, Berlin, Holland, Australia and Japan, hoovering a trove of awards, including a special Tony Award for Kohler and Jones, and its revenues exceed those of Steven Spielberg's schmaltzy 2012 screen adaptation.

Seven years on, Joey is "home" thanks to a sponsorship from Rand Merchant Bank, but the show's intellectual capital has been here all along - and not just in the heads of Kohler and Jones. Handspring's Cape Town factory has built nine sets of puppets - 87 animals in all. It takes a team of 20 staff eight months to make each set.

Before the Tokyo run, a team of elite Japanese puppetmakers came to Cape Town to study the manufacturing process, with a view to building their own set of horses.

"They watched, and interviewed us, and took drawings away," says Kohler. "But after a couple of weeks they e-mailed us and said: 'We think you should make the puppets.' We've always revered bunraku theatre, and we thought we'd learnt everything we knew about puppets from them. So it was kind of sweet for us that they deferred to us."

LIKE most master sculptors, Kohler draws astonishingly: the architectural precision of his line is charged with a current of empathy. The draughtsmanship is up there with Toulouse-Lautrec, with Kentridge.

And then he starts carving. The chisel infects the wood with soul. Each drive and shave is irreversible: the snaking grooves that define the puppets' features are often deep and recklessly gestural.

The power seems heightened by the folk-art modesty of the medium: the woodiness of Kohler's work mocks the pretensions of much contemporary figurative bronze sculpture, often so vain in its reaching for metallic posterity.

Handspring don't do didactic. Their work is provocative and lateral - with the notable exception of War Horse, whose mass appeal rests on its linear content.

If there is one simple lesson to be learnt from Kohler and Jones, it's probably the holiness of work. Start doing something difficult and beautiful that you love. Right now. Keep doing it. Teach others to do it. And don't stop. LS

• War Horse runs at Montecasino until November 30, and at the Artscape Opera House from December 5 until January 4.