Project A: Reading

Project reading: War Horse

You are going to read two newspaper reviews about the play and film War Horse.
Are you able to read these reviews? Give it a try!

Read the first review.

The horses, as everyone knows, are brilliant. The real genius of this stage version of Michael Morpurgo's novel, first seen at the National in 2007, lies in the work of the Handspring Puppet Company's Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler. They have created, out of skeletal bamboo frames and internal hinges, the most plausible and expressive quadrupeds ever to have graced the London stage. But, seeing the show a second time, I became more aware of the gulf between the sophistication of the puppetry and the one-dimensionality of the human beings.

Nick Stafford's adaptation inevitably abandons the horse's-eye-view of Morpurgo's novel to give us a more objective vision of Albert's pursuit of his equine friend, Joey, across the scarred French battlefields of the 1914-18 war. But Albert remains a cipher and the play never pursues, as Peter Shaffer's Equus does, the disturbing implications of the adolescent hero's horse-worship. For all the echoes of Oh, What a Lovely War! in the use of ballad-song to counterpoint military devastation, the show never acquires the emotional resonance of Joan Littlewood's great prototype.

All the memorable moments of Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris's production are the product of the superlative puppetry. At one point, Joey is magically transformed from a skittering foal into a bucking, rearing, grown-up horse. Later, a tank menacingly rolls across the stage like an armour-plated behemoth. Mere humans such as Kit Harington's Albert, Colin Mace's surly father and Patrick O'Kane's sympathetic German are dwarfed by the massive technical ingenuity on display.

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2009/apr/05/theatre-review-war-horse

English Dutch
hinges scharnieren
quadrupeds viervoeters
sophistication tijdelijkheid, kortstondigheid
puppetry poppentheater
equine paardachtig
foal veulen
menacingly dreigend, bedreigend
dwarfed overschaduwd

 

Read the second review.

Steven Spielberg has been working in Britain off and on for 30 years now, long enough in fact to have been awarded an honorary knighthood. But a few days ago, he described War Horse, his movie based on Michael Morpurgo's children's novel about the madness of war, as his first truly British film. "After I heard the reaction last night at the Odeon, Leicester Square," he said, "I realised I'd made my first British film with War Horse. Through and through."
Actually, the tradition War Horse belongs to is the Hollywood celebration of British pastoral that reached its peak during the second world war with Lassie Come Home and National Velvet. Both were movie versions of novels about lonely, lovable, innocent, working-class children passionately attached to animals in an idealised provincial England.

The narrator of the novel is Joey, a near-thoroughbred stallion reared on a West Country farm by the 15-year-old Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine). Nick Stafford's celebrated National theatre version uses puppets for the horses. The movie, scripted by Lee Hall, author of Billy Elliot, and Richard Curtis, our most internationally successful writer of film comedies, is a superficially realistic affair, a cross between the equine picaresque Black Beauty and All Quiet on the Western Front.

Directed by Spielberg in his most self-consciously epic manner, it takes the loyal, handsome, headstrong Joey from the windswept moors of Devon through the horrors of the first world war battlefields and back home again for the grandest sunset since Scarlett O'Hara told us that "tomorrow is another day" in Gone With the Wind. War is one of Spielberg's obsessions and he seems to have engraved on his heart Wilfred Owen's celebrated declaration: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."

War Horse is a series of brilliantly staged, highly charged setpieces starting with the lives of the proud, penniless Narracott family made special by the possession of Joey in a landscape aggrandised by a John Williams score steeped in Delius, Elgar and Vaughan Williams. There's a marvellous sequence when Albert and Joey transform an apparently useless stretch of stony land into a fertile field, the plough turning up the dark, waxy soil like a series of images from a Seamus Heaney poem.
The final 50-odd minutes of the film are a virtual tsunami of emotional waves. In a remarkably edited sequence, Joey runs amok in no-man's-land. He ends up tangled in barbed wire, jointly attended by a British soldier from Tyneside and a German from Hamburg, like something out of Oh! What a Lovely War. This leads to a succession of small, potentially lethal crises that cumulatively strain credulity and risk parching the tear ducts. But War Horse is a fable with a high moral purpose, not a documentary, and audiences will either be overwhelmed by the impact or find themselves fighting to resist it.

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jan/15/war-horse-spielberg-review
English Dutch
knighthood ridderorde
pastoral herdersspel, pastorale
narrator verhaler, verteller
thoroughbred onvoorwaardelijk, raszuiver
stallion hengst
windsept winderig
barbed wire prikkeldraad
credulity goedgelovigheid


Did you manage to read and understand these reviews?
If you did, have a try to do the exercise.

Exercise

Write a summary of the story described in both reviews.
Use the questions: who, where, when and what to write your summary.

 

Evaluation Reading

Hoe vond jij deze opdracht gaan? 
Geef bij elk onderdeel aan hoe jij vond dat het ging.

Onderdeel

Goed

Voldoende

Onvoldoende

Woordenschat

Je beheerst alle eenvoudige woorden om een briefje, e-mail of eenvoudige tekst te kunnen begrijpen.

Je beheerst de meest noodzakelijke woorden om een briefje, e-mail of eenvoudige tekst te kunnen begrijpen.

Je beheerst niet voldoende woorden om een briefje, e-mail of eenvoudige tekst te kunnen begrijpen.

Zinsbouw en grammatica Ik kan de werkwoordsvormen en zinnen goed herkennen en begrijpen. Ik kan genoeg zinnen en werkwoordsvormen herkennen. Ik begrijp sommige zinnen en werkwoordvormen. Ik kan werkwoordsvormen en zinsopbouw niet goed herkennen en begrijpen.
Tekstinzicht Je kunt de opbouw en grote lijn goed zien. Je kunt ook de betekenis van onbekende woorden makkelijk afleiden uit de context. Je kunt de opbouw en de grote lijn van een tekst vrij goed zien, maar je kunt zelden de betekenis van onbekende woorden afleiden uit de context. Ik zie de opbouw en grote lijn van de tekst niet helemaal en kan de betekenis van onbekende woorden niet afleiden uit de context.
Tempo van lezen Je kunt vlot en makkelijk doorlezen. Je begrijpt alles wat er staat. Je kunt de volledige tekst tot in alle details doorlezen. Je hebt vaak al voldoende leestempo om redelijk wat van wat je leest te begrijpen.
Je kunt de volledige tekst globaal doorlezen.
Je hebt te veel tijd nodig om alles volledig te kunnen doorlezen. Wat je leest begrijp je niet helemaal.
Leesstrategie

Je kunt naar de grote lijn van een tekst kijken en daarna naar de details.
Vooraf gebruik je de indeling, de plaatjes en voorkennis (wat je al van het onderwerp af weet).

Je kunt met gebruik van de indeling, plaatjes en voorkennis (wat je al weet van het onderwerp) met moeite de grote lijn in de tekst bekijken.
Je vertaalt nog te veel zinnen zonder verband te zien.

Je begrijpt niet goed hoe je de tekst moet aanpakken en begint woord voor woord te lezen. Je maakt te weinig gebruik van voorkennis (wat je al weet van het onderwerp).