A theatrical adaptation of The Horse and His Boy works surprisingly well.
A theatrical adaptation of The Horse and His Boy works surprisingly well.
O f all of the Narnia books to bring to the stage, The Horse and His Boy seems like it would be the most difficult. The story centers on a horse — actually, two horses — and two human children. Perhaps there is a reason that until recently, The Horse and His Boy had only been adapted for radio.
Bringing to life the other books in C. S. Lewis’s beloved Chronicles of Narnia series is difficult enough; to portray the side characters Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, for example, the 1988 film adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe put humans in massive beaver costumes, a choice that quickly became dated in the age of CGI. Without the benefits of technology, how would a talking horse come to life in a way that reanimates the book rather than distracting from the story?
The answer — at least according to the live production of The Horse and His Boy now running at the Museum of the Bible — is puppetry. And it’s much better than it sounds.
From now until March 4, the Logos Theatre, a subset of a Christian ministry dedicated to promoting the Bible through the arts, is performing The Horse and His Boy for Washington, D.C., audiences. The production, which premiered in the U.S. in 2019, boasts “epic puppetry” and “beautiful sets and costumes,” and while it would be understandable for the “puppetry” part to give potential viewers pause, it’s undoubtedly the show’s finest feature.
Arguably the best of the Narnia books, The Horse and His Boy works well as a stand-alone tale (with a few Easter eggs for Narnia fans thrown in). It is an archetypal adventure story, complete with a young hero who learns to be brave and self-sacrificial on his journey to discovering his true identity. Furthermore, it offers one of Lewis’s most powerful depictions of the justice, and mercy, of Aslan.
When orphan Shasta discovers a talking Narnian horse, the two flee the land of Calormen “for Narnia and the North.” On the way, they meet and befriend another talking horse, Hwin, and her rider, Aravis, a noble but proud girl who has more harsh words for Shasta than kind. When they learn of a plot to attack Arkanland, Narnia’s neighbor and ally, they must reach that kingdom before its enemies do.
The Horse and His Boy stage production faithfully adapts Lewis’s classic with only a few minor tweaks. While most of the dialogue comes directly from the book, the play is no mere dramatic reading. Its carefully crafted set, from undulating reams of fabric simulating water to towering palm trees, transports viewers through the Calormene Empire to Arkanland to Narnia.
As exemplified by the title, the horse is a prominent part of the story, a fact that the play’s director fully embraces. Each horse in this stage production is manned by three actors in black clothing: two inside the horse to move its legs, and one outside to move its ears, propel its head, and give it the appearance of a real character on stage. It may sound a bit convoluted, but it works — to excellent effect.
This set-up is particularly helpful as the production honors the book by emphasizing its playfulness, leaning into the novel’s many blink-and-you’ll-miss-it jokes and heightening them with physical humor.
Another potential challenge for the play is that The Horse and His Boy is full of flashbacks and scene jumps; the production again handles this ably, even taking advantage of the checkered timeline by showing the characters’ interactions as they recount their histories.
When Bree (voiced by Micah Hamilton) and Shasta (Brinton Stratton) meet Hwin (voiced by Sheri Chavers) and Aravis (Liliana Groth), Aravis explains how she also ended up running away from home, while Bree and Shasta sit in a dim spotlight to the side of the stage as Aravis reenacts her past. When she is admonished for frittering her time away with horses, Bree can be seen shuddering indignantly.
By far the most difficult challenge the play faces is the portrayal of Aslan. Bree, Hwin, and their riders are constantly beleaguered by lions throughout the book; at the end, they come to find out that it was one lion, Aslan, the whole time. It was he who chased Bree and Shasta until they met up with Hwin and Aravis. It was he who scared away the jackals threatening Shasta when he was split up from the group. And it was he who chased the four of them to go faster and reach the king of Arkanland in time.
During the early scenes, the lion onstage is styled as a normal beast, one you might see and fear as Bree and Shasta did. But when the lion reveals himself to be Aslan in a pivotal scene with Shasta, he appears on stage as a massive figure who, to the Narnia fans in the audience, must be none other than Aslan. (At least one observer murmured “wow” when he appeared.)
As with Bree and Hwin, Aslan is voiced by an actor whose lines come over a loudspeaker, keeping the puppets from appearing too puppet-like (their mouths do not move). When Aslan meets Bree and his voice echoes throughout the auditorium, the puppet quivers as if he were a real horse. Far from being a distraction, Aslan’s presence may have been as powerful on stage as it was in readers’ imaginations.
There are a few ways in which The Horse and His Boy could have been improved: The exposition about Shasta’s backstory that arrives at the end of the book comes at the opening of the play, making for an unnecessarily slow, melodramatic beginning. Also, the hermit who shelters the children and horses at one point directs Aravis to “pray,” an oddly religious directive with no precedent in Lewis’s allegorical, but not explicitly Christian, novel.
These quibbles aside, the actors in the show carry the story so well that the nearly three-hour production rushes by. Shasta and Aravis play up their childish rivalry well; the actors for Mr. Tumnus (Joseph Hainsworth) and Aravis’s friend Lasaraleen (Leah Udinski) bring comic relief throughout.
The show is accessible to all, but it is clearly designed with lovers of Narnia in mind. At the end of the play, the Pevensies (important characters from earlier in the series) announce that they’re off to search for the White Stag, a reference not to the end of The Horse and His Boy but to the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
When I saw the show on a Thursday evening, the theater was filled with Narnia fans, children, and families. The Horse and His Boy may be a children’s story, but this production certainly isn’t just for young people. It’s a faithful retelling of Lewis’s classic so engrossing that, like the characters of its source material, you’ll be surprised to awaken at the end and realize there was some force, behind the scenes, guiding you to the finish all along.