Play an exploration of boy’s animal instincts

The blinding of a horse in Peter Shaffer’s psychodrama Equus still horrifies 40 years after its premiere, says Colette Sheridan

LONDON Classic Theatre’s production of the stirring psychodrama, Equus, by Peter Shaffer, runs at Cork’s Everyman Palace Theatre from February 8-18. Since its first production, at the National Theatre in London in 1973, Shaffer’s tale of equine worship, myth and sexuality, has been produced worldwide. The Harry Potter, star Daniel Radcliffe, received a ‘best actor’ award for his portrayal of the troubled Alan Strang in a Broadway production in 2009. In 1977, the play was filmed starring Richard Burton.

In writing Equus, Shaffer was inspired by a news story of a British youth who blinded horses in a stable. Shaffer’s goal was “to create a mental world in which the deed could be made comprehensible.”

Malcolm James plays psychiatrist Martin Dysart, who treats the stable boy, Strang, played by Matthew Pattimore. James says the premise of the play is shocking. “The boy blinds six horses with a metal spike, which is astonishing. But that’s not really what the play is about. It focuses on Dysart trying to get to grips with what has caused the boy to do what he has done. What is most shocking is that in trying to understand the boy, Dysart comes to envy him. That’s a lot for audiences to take on board. The boy has basically committed animal murder, because even if the horses survived, they would have had to be put down.”

James talks about the ‘passion’ in the play. He says it is a sense of having something in life that stops one from being ordinary. “The boy has something extraordinary going on. His fixation on horses is a mixture of religion and eroticism. His mother is very religious and told him stories from the Bible that included horses. His father becomes very much anti-religion and takes down a picture of the crucifixion that the boy had hanging over his head in his bedroom. A picture of a horse is put up on the wall in its place. The boy transposes his intense religious feelings onto a horse and it becomes his god. At the same time, he is going through adolescence, exploring his sexuality,” he says.

Strang has a relationship with a girl, but he believes that the all-seeing god, a horse (called Nugget), is watching him and is becoming jealous.

“In the process of analysing the boy, Dysart creates this Freudian thing. It’s sex meets religion meets the parents. It’s a heady cocktail,” James says.

The nudity in the play “is not gratuitous. The boy and the girl, Jill, take their clothes off. It’s very innocent and charming,” James says. It’s unfortunate that the nudity attracts so much attention. “It’s there for a very valid theatrical reason.”

Strang is the catalyst for Dysart’s questioning of his career as a successful psychiatrist. “Dysart starts to have doubts about what he is doing. He wonders if he can really know what is going on inside someone’s head. His anxiety and doubt turns into anger and despair. He is in a place where he doesn’t know what he’s doing and actually thinks he’s doing more harm than good. He sees himself as the boy at the end of the play because, as he says, he stands in the dark with a pick in his hands, striking heads. Just as the boy blinded horses, the psychiatrist feels he’s causing untold damage to people. He also has to face up to his loveless marriage. He admits to this for the first time, having seen the intensity of the feelings the boy has for Nugget. He realises he doesn’t have that.”

James says the set design is like a Greek amphitheatre. Eight cast members are on the stage all the time. When they retreat from their scenes, they become “like a Greek chorus. They observe and judge and commentate.” This aspect of the play is in keeping with Dysart’s fascination with ancient Greece and the gods.

Some actors play horses. “The main one, Nugget, has a beautiful head. It’s constructed out of bamboo, and leather patches sprayed with gold paint. It looks partly like a horse and partly like an ancient Greek helmet that warriors used to wear. You can see the human head through it. It’s fantastic to look at, because you can see the eyes. That’s all-important, because there is so much in the play about the boy being fascinated with the eyes of the horse, watching him all the time,” James says. This production uses Shaffer’s rewrite of the play. “References that date the play to the 1970s are taken out. But it’s not a big rewrite. It’s very much a timeless piece of work,” says James.