Strider
– The Story of a Horse
The Sunday
Telegraph, 29th January 1984, Francis King
A tendentious
note in the programme of Mark Rozovsky’s version, adapted by Peter Tegel, of
Tolstoy’s Strider – The Story of a Horse (Cottesloe) states that Tolstoy was
“using the horse as a symbol of the inhumanity of the class system.”
Mr Rozovsky is a famous Soviet director and his
audiences in Moscow may believe this. It is nonsense. Essentially “Strider” is
about three things: man’s cruelty to man; man’s cruelty to animals; and the
cruelty of time to all living things.
Strider is a superb animal; but because he is born
piebald, his situation is as parlous as that of a man taken off to be hanged
for the flaming colour of his hair in A.E. Houseman’s poem. The punishment of
Strider’s nonconformity is not hanging but gelding.
Having been presented by his breeder to the head
groom as a thing of no worth, he is bought by a dissolute prince, with an eye
for his qualities and a bargain. He becomes a champion.
When, however, his racing days are over, the prince
has no compunction about selling him off. He passes from hand to hand, becoming
older and feebler, until his final owner gives the order for his throat to be
cut. Flayed, his carcase becomes carrion for dogs and wolves.
Paralleling this decline is that of the prince, his
fortune dissipated and his estates mortgaged and his health ruined by drink.
The story is a tragic one; and it is particularly
tragic in this version, since so much emphasis is placed on Strider’s
sufferings and so little on his triumphs.
I myself found Tolstoy’s anthropomorphic view of
horses harder to accept on the stage, with actors prancing, neighing and
rearing up in Michael Bogdanov’s balletic production; but there is no doubt of
the extraordinary skill of Michael Pennington’s performance as first a
high-spirited, gawky foal, then a proud winner and finally a broken-down hack.
The appropriately sombre musical settings are by Terry Mortimer.
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