How Would You Create The Illusion Of A Character In A Play Riding Off On A Horse?

It depends a lot on the overall concept of your play. The more abstract it is, the more options you have. Representation is the bane of theater. In the usual stagings of the play Equus, the actor playing Alan Strang climbs onto the back of the actor playing Nugget and rides around. The audience has been asked to suspend disbelief and accept that this person is representing a horse. Nugget is usually provided with a mask or other indications of his horse-ness, but he's not made up to look like a horse. The harder you try to make him look like a horse, in fact, the sillier he looks. If the saddle itself is an important image in the play, you can put it out there and use it in a variety of ways. If you've got the budget you could suspend it from wires and fly the actor off. Or you could mount it on rails and have other actors or stagehands carry it off. Or you could just mount it on a post and close the curtain, if the text lets you pull that off. He could simply carry it off stage, ...  more