Review | Equus – The Theatre Royal, Bath

Peter Shaffer’s extraordinary Equus could potentially be a difficult sell for some audiences.

Photo © Manuel Harlan

It’s a verbose 2¾ hour play about a complacent middle-aged psychiatrist and his patient, a deeply troubled young man; it sometimes lapses into rambling monologues about Greek mythology and surreal ritualistic nightmares; and it culminates in foreboding despair for one of the main characters.

But for those brave enough to take up the challenge, the reward is an evening of utterly spellbinding theatrical magic, holding its audience silent and rapt through every minute of its sinuous darkness.

Based on a real-life event in which a young man blinded horses at a local stable, Equus is a murky journey into the depths of the human psyche. Seemingly average teenager Alan Strang has blinded six horses in an unprovoked attack, and is committed to a psychiatric hospital under the care of overworked child psychiatrist Martin Dysart.

Initially Alan, locked in his trauma, refuses to communicate at all except through apparently meaningless chanting of TV advert jingles, but through Dysart’s persistence he begins to trust him and we see the background (family, education, religion, sexual development) which led up to this event.

But as Alan begins to head towards understanding and an apparent healing, what effect will this have on the hitherto complacent psychiatrist and the safe world in which he has enveloped himself?

Director Lindsay Posner uses the bare staging beautifully; in designer Paul Farnsworth’s oppressive set we have a dark open platform with just four simple benches, and facing inwards are the cast for the play’s duration, motionless, observing, highlighting Alan’s paranoia of his inner thoughts being seen. Six men play the horses and they are seated at the rear, dimly lit, erect and still like judging deities from the past.

Paul Pyant and Adam Cork use their remarkable lighting and sound designs to seamlessly conjure both the humdrum of the psychiatrist office and the dark electric rush of Alan’s communion with the horses.

In most productions, the actors representing the horses are adorned with hooves and headpieces, but here they are simply near-naked lithe men (played by actors with utterly superb dance skills) and this brings fresh homoerotic clarity to Alan’s confused, conflicted, sexual attraction towards them in his developing mind.

The scene of the naked night-time horse ride closes Act One on a stunning visceral moment of exhilaration, and the eventual recreation of the blinding is savage and yet strangely beautiful and redemptive. Under movement director James Cousins’ steering, these are electric moments of pure theatrical euphoria, ones which will linger in the mind for years.

As Dysart, Toby Stephens captures fully the disheveled, buttoned-up respectability of the doctor, gradually peeling away the staid safeness of his world, so the one moment when he finally loses his composure and shouts is truly jarring.

Noah Valentine’s Alan is initially combative, elusive and hard to like, but following his liberating recreation of the horse riding incident, gives a beautifully modulated insight into the confused and fundamentally innocent young mind trying to understand his world. It’s a captivating performance.

Equus is undoubtedly a dark and troubling play, offering little real hope for the human condition. Marriage is stale and meaningless (Alan’s parents clash on politics and religion, and in this production are seated next to each other but insidiously separated by a black curtain; Dysart lives a life disconnected from his unseen wife).

Religion brings repression, paranoia and trauma. The everyday stuff we surround ourselves with (status, normalcy, academia) cloak our inner spirits and dull our senses.

Only troubled young Alan is fundamentally alive, whilst the doctors, nurses, lawyers and parents can only observe from their self-made prisons. And the result is stunning.

A truly electric, visceral and transformative event – this is what great theatre really is.

Equus is showing at Theatre Royal Bath until 25th July. Box office: 01225 448844.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Reviewer: Steve Huggins