EVEN WITHOUT HORSES, THIS IS A WILD RIDE
Equus (Theatre Royal Stratford East and touring) Verdict: A thrilling reinvention ★★★★★
I AM — I thought — firmly of the school of thought that no one should ever be nude on stage. No drama is sturdy enough to prevent a room full of the theatre-going classes being totally distracted by genitals.
Every production of this play is haunted by the need to somehow have horses, and that incredibly long nude scene.
so often this is complicated by star casting. the actual sight of Harry Potter and his chamber of secrets in a 2008 production really threw the room.
thankfully, this theatre Royal stratford East/ English touring theatre production completely rips my rule to shreds and turns out one of the most heart-rattling thrillers I’ve seen in a while. Peter shaffer’s 1973 play is the tale of a deeply disturbed teenager with a ‘destructive worship’ of horses, to the extent that he blinds six of them in a stable and is packed off to the psychiatrist.
Ethan Kai as the young man is brilliantly numb, then caged, then loquacious, then furiously passionate. Zubin Varla’s psychiatrist prowls the stage, fag in hand, giving us perfect wit then crushing despair. together their consultations and surreal flights into memory sequences are so charismatic. the sexual intensity is never silly (as I’ve seen before), it’s genuinely terrifying.
But the fundamental triumph of director Ned Bennett’s version is the deceptively simple but devastatingly powerful production. It’s a simple blank set of dirty white curtains, but Jessica Hung Han Yun’s lighting splashes around in an almost endless palette. A man in front of me actually gasped at one transition.
Most productions struggle with the horses; strange dancers, occasionally with masks prancing around and neighing like crazed circus performers. But here, the choreography is bang on. they slide into the action seamlessly, as if a man in shorts braying was the most natural thing in the world.
this crowd — surprisingly not packed — was entranced start to finish. so when trousers inevitably dropped, we hardly noticed.