WAR HORSE play coming to NYC from London

[Jerry]

Evidently it's a hit drama about how one million horses went to the front in France in the Great War, and only 60,000 came back.

 

The writer Michael Morpurgo met with 35 NY actors and gave them some background: Iddesleigh in Devon gets a lot of rain, second only to the Lake District. Homes are 'cobs' from mud, stone, and pig's blood. The hedge rows were laid 1,000 years ago by Anglo-Saxons. The book was inspired when a boy that hadn't spoken in two years came to stay at the Farm for City Children -- spoke to a horse in the barn. The memorable thing was not the boy spoke but that the horse used body language to pay attention to the words, as if it knew its part in the world.

 

OK, it's a play -- not a book or film, but it began as a children's book. Oh, and I learned that the french call the English Channel: Le Manche, as if THEY own it.