to talk about the evolution of a puppet horse.

Basil Jones: But actually we're going to start this evolution

with a hyena.

AK: The ancestor of the horse.

Okay, we'll do something with it.

(Laughter)

Hahahaha.

The hyena is the ancestor of the horse

because it was part of a production

called "Faustus in Africa,"

a Handspring Production from 1995,

where it had to play draughts with Helen of Troy.

This production was directed

by South African artist and theater director,

William Kentridge.

So it needed a very articulate front paw.

But, like all puppets, it has other attributes.

BJ: One of them is breath,

and it kind of breathes.

AK: Haa haa haaa.

BJ: Breath is really important for us.

It's the kind of original movement

for any puppet for us onstage.

It's the thing that distinguishes the puppet --

AK: Oops.

BJ: From an actor.

Puppets always have to try to be alive.

It's their kind of ur-story onstage,

that desperation to live.

AK: Yeah, it's basically a dead object, as you can see,

and it only lives

because you make it.

An actor struggles to die onstage,

but a puppet has to struggle to live.

And in a way that's a metaphor for life.

BJ: So every moment it's on the stage, it's making the struggle.

So we call this

a piece of emotional engineering

that uses up-to-the-minute

17th century technology --

(Laughter)

to turn nouns

into verbs.

AK: Well actually I prefer to say

that it's an object

constructed out of wood and cloth

with movement built into it

to persuade you to believe that it has life.

BJ: Okay so.

AK: It has ears that move passively

when the head goes.

BJ: And it has these bulkheads

made out of plywood,

covered with fabric --

curiously similar, in fact,

to the plywood canoes

that Adrian's father used to make

when he was a boy in their workshop.

AK: In Port Elizabeth, the village outside Port Elizabeth in South Africa.

BJ: His mother was a puppeteer.

And when we met at art school

and fell in love

in 1971,

I hated puppets.

I really thought they were so beneath me.

I wanted to become an avant-garde artist --

and Punch and Judy was certainly not where I wanted to go.

And, in fact, it took about 10 years

to discover

the Bambara Bamana puppets of Mali in West Africa,

where there's a fabulous tradition of puppetry,

to learn a renewed, or a new, respect

for this art form.

AK: So in 1981, I persuaded Basil and some friends of mine

to form a puppet company.

And 20 years later, miraculously,

we collaborated with a company from Mali,

the Sogolon Marionette Troupe of Bamako,

where we made a piece about a tall giraffe.

It was just called "Tall Horse," which was a life-sized giraffe.

BJ: And here again, you see the same structure.

The bulkheads have now turned into hoops of cane,

but it's ultimately the same structure.

It's got two people inside it on stilts,

which give them the height,

and somebody in the front

who's using a kind of steering wheel to move that head.

AK: The person in the hind legs

is also controlling the tail, a bit like the hyena --

same mechanism, just a bit bigger.

And he's controlling the ear movement.

BJ: So this production

was seen by Tom Morris

of the National Theatre in London.

And just around that time,

his mother had said,

"Have you seen this book by Michael Morpurgo

called 'War Horse'?"

AK: It's about a boy who falls in love with a horse.

The horse is sold to the First World War,

and he joins up to find his horse.

BJ: So Tom gave us a call and said,

"Do you think you could make us a horse

for a show to happen at the National Theatre?"

AK: It seemed a lovely idea.

BJ: But it had to ride. It had to have a rider.

AK: It had to have a rider,

and it had to participate in cavalry charges.

(Laughter)

A play about early 20th century plowing technology

and cavalry charges

was a little bit of a challenge for the accounting department

at the National Theatre in London.

But they agreed to go along with it for a while.

So we began with a test.

BJ: This is Adrian and Thys Stander,

who went on to actually design the cane system for the horse,

and our next-door neighbor Katherine,

riding on a ladder.

The weight is really difficult when it's up above your head.

AK: And once we put Katherine

through that particular brand of hell,

we knew that we might be able to make a horse, which could be ridden.

So we made a model.

This is a cardboard model,

a little bit smaller than the hyena.

You'll notice that the legs are plywood legs

and the canoe structure is still there.

BJ: And the two manipulators are inside.

But we didn't realize at the time

that we actually needed a third manipulator,

because we couldn't manipulate the neck

from inside

and walk the horse at the same time.

AK: We started work on the prototype

after the model was approved,

and the prototype took a bit longer

than we anticipated.

We had to throw out the plywood legs and make new cane ones.

And we had a crate built for it.

It had to be shipped to London.

We were going to test-drive it on the street outside of our house in Cape Town,

and it got to midnight and we hadn't done that yet.

BJ: So we got a camera,

and we posed the puppet

in various galloping stances.

And we sent it off

to the National Theatre,

hoping that they believed

that we created something that worked.

(Laughter)

AK: A month later, we were there in London

with this big box and a studio full of people about to work with us.

BJ: About 40 people.

AK: We were terrified.

We opened the lid, we took the horse out,

and it did work; it walked and it was able to be ridden.

Here I have an 18-second clip

of the very first walk of the prototype.

This is in the National Theatre studio,

the place where they cook new ideas.

It had by no means got the green light yet.

The choreographer, Toby Sedgwick,

invented a beautiful sequence

where the baby horse,

which was made out of sticks and bits of twigs,

grew up into the big horse.

And Nick Starr, the director of the National Theatre,

saw that particular moment, he was standing next to me -- he nearly wet himself.

And so the show was given the green light.

And we went back to Cape Town and redesigned the horse completely.

Here is the plan.

(Laughter)

And here is our factory in Cape Town

where we make horses.

You can see quite a lot of skeletons in the background there.