Obviously Peter Shaffer’s landmark 1973 play Equus has dated in some ways. It has gone from a story set ‘now’ to a ‘70s period drama. Its views on psychiatry are, at the very least, simplistic, speaking of an era where the concept was novel.
But my god: it’s hard to see that mainstream British theatre ever getting more extreme – certainly psychologically – than Shaffer’s opus. It’s a seethingly sexual, deeply unsettling interrogation of the Apollonian versus the Dionysian that centres on Alan Strang, a young man who – as the play begins – has just brutally blinded six horses. But why? And what’s to be done?
In some way Shaffer’s great achievement is simply in going there. Inspired by a real life incident (that involved the blinding of 26 horses), if the author was any less earnest in the way he ploughs into Alan’s unimaginably disturbing actions and psychology, it wouldn’t work. And indeed the naughty tittering elicited from the tabloid press when Daniel Radcliffe took on the role of Alan almost 20 years ago says it all - this is difficult stuff to talk about sincerely.
Interestingly, though, 2007’s D-Rad-starring revival has ushered in a modest renaissance for the play, which wasn’t touched for over 30 years after its original NT run ended in 1975 but has now been done a fair bit, with an ultra-modern 2019 version at Stratford East, and now this from the Menier.
Historically Equus has been about scale and spectacle, with the six actor-dancers playing the horses typically wearing elaborate mesh headpieces and cantering around a large stage in elaborately choreographed fashion.
Here, though, old-school director Lindsay Postner plays a blinder by using the Menier’s core strength of intimacy. There are no headpieces for the horses, but there don’t need to be: we’re all close enough to see the unnerving dead eyes of the horse actors. Superbly choreographed by James Cousins, their only adornment is tight black trousers and smears of body paint, but they are unnerving, sinuous presences with odd, inhuman movements. For the most part they sit at the back of the stage in a semi circle, but when deployed they ooze out like some baleful, wordless chorus.
Toby Stephens is excellent as Martin Dysart, the broadminded regional psychiatrist who is the only person careworn local magistrate Hesther (Amanda Abbington) feels she can send 17-year-old Alan to. His matinee idol features obscured by glasses and a shaggy beard, Stephens’ Dysart is a vulnerable, nervy man whose cultivated professional veneer conceals doubts from the off. It’s not just his anxiety dream about being an Ancient Greek priest, queasily committing endless child sacrifices - Stephens gives him a sense of fallibility from the off as he cringes from a furious Alan during a first encounter.
And Noah Valentine is a wonderful Alan, boyishly vulnerable but with an elemental otherness that’s often menacing in the extreme but is also pure, free, his own. As the play runs on Dysart becomes increasingly awed by Alan’s strangeness and increasingly questioning of the ethics of ‘curing’ him to lead a drab life.
Is it an immaculately researched work of science? No! It’s a made-up story about human nature and how a strange, complicated emotional diet of religion, socialism, repressed sexuality and a chance childhood encounter with a rider set Alan down a certain path that led to a shocking ‘real’ conclusion. But it’s the extremes Shaffer takes it to that give it weight, and Dysart’s passionate defence of Alan’s otherness clearly has a wider meaning than this one case. (I think it would be tricky to write now because it might look like Shaffer was making a comment about autism, which was little known in 1973)
And the intimacy of Posner’s production magnifies all that, focussing Shaffer’s meaning and burning away pedantic quibbles. There’s little in the way of set, the actors sit in the front row of the audience when not on stage, and the horses are omnipresent, inescapable, always sitting there, blank eyed and judging.
