At best, Peter Shaffer’s play about a jaded psychiatrist and a teenage boy who blinds horses in some psycho-sexual fit of religious pique, complete with naked actors sporting ritualistic horses’ heads, might become some cause celebre in the face of a smattering of middle England outrage. Unless, that is, you get Harry Potter to get his kit off.
For many, this was one of the main attractions of the 2007 revival of Shaffer’s 1973 play, the first in London since the original production. In a pop cultural casting coup, a buff Daniel Radcliffe starred as troubled teen Alan Strang, playing opposite Richard Griffiths, late of The History Boys, as psychiatrist Martin Dysart. Despite its meaty themes, Equus duly took Radcliffe to the west end and Broadway, while on the UK tour that followed, Alfie Allen, son of Keith, brother of Lily, played Strang, with Simon Callow as Dysart.
Only Callow, who appeared to be in a different play to everyone else, failed to transcend the production’s initial tabloid attention and redeem themselves as stage actors in their own right.
This may be some comfort to Dundee Rep associate director Jemima Levick. Without the luxury of celebrity appeal, her intimate production, which puts the audience more or less on Dysart’s couch, can only focus on the ideas behind this strangest of plays about sex, worship and finding passion in a humdrum world.
Yet, despite its seriousness, the whiff of celebrity isn’t something new for Equus. John Dexter’s original production for the National Theatre, then in residence at the Old Vic, transferred to the Albery Theatre (now the Noel Coward Theatre) before a Broadway run sealed its reputation with a Tony award for best new play.
With the National just entering its Peter Hall years that would see its bullish arrival on the South Bank, all parties involved in Equus had form. Shaffer had previously been produced by the NT in 1964, when
Dexter directed The Royal Hunt of the Sun, the first world premiere by the then year-old company.
Onstage, Alec McCowan, already a titan of the English stage, played Dysart with what one critic called “a knife edge of professional skill and personal disgust”.’
Strang was played by Peter Firth, a former child star who had appeared in the American-backed TV series, Here Come The Double Deckers. At The Albery, Firth appeared opposite Colin Blakely, and on Broadway with Anthony Hopkins.
Later, former Psycho star Anthony Perkins played Dysart, with a young Tom Hulce as Strang. Richard
Burton, who would go on to play Dysart in Sidney Lumet’s naturalistic 1977 film version of the play, which would again star Firth, appeared briefly on Broadway, before things came full circle as McCowan returned to the role.
In a 1992 interview, Shaffer observed the different responses to Equus, in that “the English regarded the central event as shocking because it was cruel to horses, and the American audience was fascinated by it because it was cruel to psychiatrists.”
Born in Liverpool in 1926, Shaffer’s first stage play, Five Finger Exercise, was directed by John Gielgud, and was his first work to transfer to Broadway.
A double bill of The Private Ear and The Public Eye starring Maggie Smith did likewise, followed by The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Black
Comedy, White Lies and The Battle of Shrivings. It was Equus, however, that lingers. Taken from a true story Shaffer was told about a boy apparently from an ordinary but fanatical religious family who was alleged to have blinded 26 horses following a sex session with a stable girl, Equus truly reflected its times.
By the early 1970s, the 1960s-inspired so-called permissive society had trickled into public consciousness enough to infiltrate Britain’s suburbs. For some, television, then noted for its gritty realist dramas depicting various forms of “loose living”,’ was to blame.
Strang’s mantra in Equus, after all, was a strung-together set of jingles taken from TV ads. In the cinema, meanwhile, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange suggested a world of violent delinquents revelling in their new freedom at society’s expense.
Equus appeared the same year as The Wicker Man, the Scottish-set feature film scripted by Shaffer’s brother Anthony. In different ways, both works explored sex, religion and potential liberation through both. If free love and paganism won out over bunged-up Christian morality in The Wicker Man, in Equus, for Dysart as much for Strang, only guilt and repression remained.
Speaking in 1992 again, Shaffer stressed that Equus categorically isn’t using Strang as a symbol for a counter-cultural free-for-all.
Rather, “He’s terrified. He has gone very far into a kind of Dionysia world which is repaying him by tearing him into pieces. He has to be relieved of that, but in the process, Dysart comes to the conclusion that he will also remove the source of his ecstasy and return him to that rather neutered state of a lot of people in the modern world, you see them lining up for buses, going to work any old day in an English suburb, and that he has to do that, because his duty as a doctor compels him to it.
“Tragedy,” Shaffer continued, “is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right…it is not just a charter for people to go away and behave ecstatically without any heed to the consequence, or destructively. What (Strang) is doing is seeking to evade the judging eye, to put out the eye of God, to escape, and it’s about the divided self in him.”
Equus runs at Dundee Rep to March 20
www.dundeereptheatre.co.uk
