A revival well worth saddling up for
Trafalgar Studios, London SW1 Equus
The last time Peter Shaffer’s
Equus bestrode the West End stage, in 2007, two things were striking about the coverage. First, there was media excitement about Daniel Radcliffe, then riding a wave of hysteria about Harry Potter, getting his kit off in the role of Alan Strang, the maladjusted youth whose erotic equine fixation and shocking horse-blinding frenzy form the central psychological mystery.
Secondly, there was a disdain for the play’s intellectual purview: the idea that the story – inspired by a real-life case – had profound things to say about society’s shackling of the forces within us. A typical critical reflex about Shaffer, which extended even to his later, greater work Amadeus, is that he’s the peddler of dressed-up dramatic mediocrity. The broad gripe was that here was old-fashioned thrill-seeking (nudity, borderline bestiality) given the fig leaf of high-minded respectability.
In my view, the glib dismissal of Shaffer’s vision of an ancient conflict at the heart of human society, about ceding to the libido and suppressing it, as old hat, facile and exploitative, actually proved the ongoing validity of a work first seen in 1973. We remain screwed up about sex. It may be tough arguing that Equus is a masterpiece, but its recurrence suggests it’s needed.
If there’s a reason to stampede now to the Trafalgar Studios, it’s that Ned Bennett presides over an intensely atmospheric affair that’s unembarrassed in every sense and has a total commitment to the thesis. Under his dexterous rein, the action incarnates Shaffer’s ideas: the cost of resisting primal urges along with
civilisation’s requirement that we do so is felt on the pulse.
Keeping period detail to a minimum, Georgia Lowe’s set gives us a feeling of being holed up in a psychiatric hospital – white curtains surround the stage on three sides, allowing for swift apparitions and a subliminal sense of things lurking in the wings. It’s as much a head-state as external space, and implicitly we’re inside the mind of Zubin Varla’s psychiatrist Dysart as he looks back over Strang’s case and suffers paroxysms of doubt as to the virtue of medically fathoming, and normalising, his charge.
Everything feels intimately connected, not a phrase sounds like flannel or flab. In Ethan Kai’s Strang we see a boy who conforms to the usual teenage type of brooding resentment. But when he is shown with his horse, nuzzling him like a lover, his whole being radiates ecstatic release. In contrast to prior productions, there are no horse-masks; the ensemble uses expressive lithe physicality to suggest ear-pricking alertness, sweet docility and residual hoof-power.
You can argue that this heightens the latent suggestion that Strang’s strangeness – the surrogate religion he finds in horse-worship, his impotence with his girlfriend (Norah Lopez Holden’s sympathetic, pained Jill) – is a form of repressed homosexuality. Yet the rigour of this revival is that it honours the play’s schematic nature without being didactic; his fervent communion with the “other” lies in wordless emotion, at once human and animal. I’ve not seen a more richly achieved production at Trafalgar Studios since its conversion from the Whitehall in 2004.
It’s perfect for that constricted main stage, a boundless pleasure.