Equus
By Doug O’Kane
It is not very often that a play can pose questions that stay in the audience’s mind for days as well as delivering a totally engrossing, original and scintillating show. But this production of Peter Shaffer’s controversial and critically-acclaimed play, Equus, did exactly that.
The play follows Martin Dysart, a psychiatrist at a children’s hospital in Hampshire, who reluctantly accepts an addition to his already oversized list of patients. He is intrigued when he discovers that the boy, Alan Strang, blinded six horses and soon becomes obsessed with the case as it makes him question his own life.
The story was told through conversations between the main characters which intertwine with flashbacks of Alan’s life. Alan’s encounters with the horses, his parents and a girl whom he worked with are all revealed to the audience with Dysart looking on and occasionally interrupting the scenes to ask Allen questions.
On many occasions several characters would be on stage together and the story would jump forward and back in time with events from the past being shown. A spotlight would be used to show who was involved in the current scene and who was just “watching”. This was an incredibly simple technique but it worked brilliantly and kept the tempo up.
Alfie Allen, brother of singer Lilly Allen, played the disturbed Strang. While at first his voice was irritating and his acting seemed rather cartoonish, he did deliver an energetic and memorable performance.
The show was stolen, however, by the brilliant Simon Callow. The star of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, was fantastic as the troubled psychiatrist. Richard Griffiths played Dysart in last year’s production of Equus but it is difficult to see how anyone could fit the part as perfectly as Callow.
With incredible skill Callow was able to show the gradual breakdown of an extremely articulate and emotional man who was forced to look at his own life after meeting Allen’s character.
Strang is shown to be an extremely disturbed young man. It is revealed that he worshipped and kissed the horses and was obsessed with a “horse-god” called Equus. But in a strange twist Dysart becomes jealous of the boy, because he has some real passion in life of the kind the doctor has never experience. It is a One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest-like case of the insane person being saner than the sane guy, as Strang causes Dysart to question every part of himself. Dysart becomes depressed that he can stop his patients doing bad things but in doing so he will take away a vital part of their human nature.
Colin Hurley and Helen Anderson were both fantastic as Mr and Mrs Strang. They perfectly portrayed a couple whose marital problems had been exposed due to their stress over the actions of their son.
Anderson was very good as the religious and motherly Mrs Strang. Hurley was brilliant as the frustrated and over-bearing dad who is hiding a dirty secret. While it is clear that these two characters do love each other and their son, they are constantly arguing over the way they treat Alan and particularly over Mrs Strang’s religion. The way religion influences people was one of the major issues explored in the play.
The only slightly week performance was Laura O’Toole as Strang’s love interest, Jill. The actress was obviously not originally English as Jill’s posh Hampshire accent kept giving way to a thick Irish accent and her incessant swaying on stage was rather bewildering.
One of the most impressive elements of the play was the “horses”. They were all excellently and athletically played by six actors dressed in brown trousers and skin tight shirts with small stilts and hooves as shoes. They also wore huge skeletal horse-heads with bright lights for their eyes and moved in jerkily equine ways. This was extremely effectively especially in scenes such as when we finally see Alan blind the horses.
Part of the brilliance of any performance of Equus is obviously the incredible script and story created by Peter Shaffer, but the acting and the simple but innovative techniques used in this production were equally important in making this one of the most thrilling, emotional and thought-provoking plays to grace the
Sheffield theatres this year.
