Given the globe-trotting success of War Horse – eight years old and still cantering on – it’s easy to understand why theatremakers like Michael Morpurgo.
The latest work by Cornish troupe Kneehigh, based on Morpurgo’s 2006 novella The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips, seems a good bet. The world war in question is the second, and this story centres on the arrival of American GIs in another part of Devon, but the parallels are inescapable: the relationship between a child, Lily, and a beloved animal (here Lily’s pet cat), the brute intrusion of wartime into an English rural idyll. It’s even got puppets. (946 is the grim, real-life death-toll that resulted from a botched training exercise for D-Day; calling it War Cat might have been too obvious.)
With its spangly-suited blues musicians and its multi-tasking, singing-and-dancing cast, the show has Kneehigh’s customary rough-theatre razzmatazz. Morpurgo and Emma Rice’s adaptation hop-skips nimbly between past and present, and around the lives of villagers, London child evacuees, and the lonesome African-American GIs stranded in a strange land.
This is also its shortcoming: a great deal feels like padding, and in the end there’s the suspicion that 946 can’t work out what it wants to be about. Only in the final minutes, when a dead soldier (the terrific Nandi Bhebhe) steps forward to sing a spiritual aching with love and desolation, does the show become anchored in emotion.
You also sense in Kneehigh’s eagerness to please that they miss the really interesting thing: the lives of those GIs. In the programme there’s the bittersweet account of a woman called Margaret, a few years older than Lily, who remembers the black infantrymen who came to Wadebridge in Cornwall – illicit lindy-hopping, racist US army sergeants, the stiffness in her fingers from crimping Cornish pasties “filled with love”. Now that’s a play I’d like to watch.
• Until 23 August at The Asylum, Cornwall.
