But Nicholls falls in battle and his sketchbook is sent home to Albert. Ted sells Joey to the army behind his son’s back only the guarantee of Lieutenant Nicholls (Stephen Plunkett), who admires the horse and has been making sketches of him, that he’ll take personal care of him calms Albert. The resulting idyll of horse and boy is disturbed when war breaks out two years later, however. And in an archetypal scene Joey surpasses everyone’s expectations and drags the wagon over the designated line. When Ted’s impatient efforts to train Joey aggravate the horse into kicking him, his impulse is to administer a savage beating, so an incensed Albert goes to work himself to try to win his father’s unlikely bet for him. Arthur wants the horse for himself, so he gets his brother drunk and bets him the mortgage money that he can’t train Joey to haul a wagon, knowing that if he loses he’ll have no choice but to sell the horse to Arthur. But true to a certain kind of coming-of-age narrative – National Velvet (1944) and The Black Stallion (1979) would be the key examples from American movies – the proud, noble animal exerts a magical pull on the boy, who names him Joey and tames him. The horse is an impractical purchase: it’s a hunter, not a work animal, so it’s of no use on the farm, as his wife Rose (Alyssa Bresnahan) is quick to point out.
Arthur is constantly needling Ted, throwing his financial success and his record of service in the Boer War – when Ted stayed home to support his family – in his face, and when Ted has had a few drinks he can’t resist the bait. The brothers’ relationship is poisonously competitive, though rarely equal. Ryder Smith), who’s bidding for the same animal. The play begins in Devon, England in 1912, where a farm boy named Albert Narracott (Seth Numrich) falls in love with a beautiful chestnut horse that his father, Ted (Boris McGiver), buys impulsively at auction, really just to get a leg up on his older brother Arthur (T.
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