War Horse

"The bare Olivier stage gives the company nowhere to hide, and that exposure is the gamble Smith’s design takes and wins: with no walls to lean on, the acting has to be true, and it is. Rob Casey’s lighting conjures the worlds the scenery refuses to build. A wash of low gold and you’re in a Devon meadow at harvest. A cold sidelight and the same bare boards are a frozen French field at dawn. A stutter of white and the air itself seems to detonate. Men become silhouettes, vanish into smoke, come back as ghosts. It is astonishing how much world four lamps and a torn sheet of paper can conjure."