A HORSE ON A TREADMILL.

A HORSE ON A TREADMILL. The Bridge Project, founded by Sam Mendes, has been bringing Shakespeare and Chekhov to audiences around the world for the past two years. An article about the company in the weekend Financial Times (June 18/June 19) included comments by one actor abut the differences in audiences. The German audiences, he thought, were “unnervingly polite”—no laughing, no coughing, no shuffling. On the other hand, “In Paris and Madrid they were so exuberant….” I mentioned this to Mary Jane, and she said that she had been to a play in France once, but that her experience was different. It was a performance of Cyrano at the Theatre Mogador that she found very exciting, but there was little response from the audience until a scene where there was a horse moving forward on a treadmill. The audience went crazy about the horse.