Tigers and War Horse

How do they make stick puppets so real?

We went to London last month and spent the day at London Zoo and the evening in the theatre watching War Horse. It was a “works outing” from my Mum’s surgery – so we all piled on a coach first thing in the morning and were bussed home again at about midnight. Once in London we could decide what we wanted to do and then met in a pub later before going to the theatre.

The zoo was fun but I was quite surprised by how small it seemed to be. I guess this is because it is old. It opened in 1828 before Victoria came to the throne and I imagine they were quite happy to cram the animals in – as good animal welfare is a relatively new concept. Having said that, I compared the size of London Zoo with the Bioparc near Angers that I visited on my exchange to France and it turns out both are almost exactly the same size. Maybe there is a natural size for a zoo? If so, it is around 15 ha or 36 acres!

My favourite animals here were the Tigers. We managed to see them being fed. The keepers did things like hanging meat 4 metres in the air to force the animals to climb to reach their food. What power – I wouldn’t want to meet a hungry one face to face! I never did understand the book “The Tiger Who Came to Tea”, although I’m told it was a favourite of mine at one time. More likely it was a favourite of my parents’ as it was quite short!

War Horse is spectacular – I think I mentioned earlier that musicals are not really my thing but this is unique. The puppetry is out of this world and the stage effects were amazing in recreating vicious, bloody battle in a theatre. I was dead impressed. I had already read Michael Morpurgo’s book, so there weren’t going to be any surprises in the storyline but it still managed to get a tear or two from me!