Equus review: A fine revival of a deeply odd but significant play

Noah Valentine (Alan Strang) and the company of Equus - (Manuel Harlan)

This classy revival of Peter Shaffer’s 1973 play about a boy undergoing analysis after blinding six horses reveals its hybrid nature. Equus is an earnest exploration of belief, a homo-erotic study of repressed sexuality and an occasionally absurd melodrama. Lindsay Posner’s production, which marks Shaffer’s centenary, showcases a performance of glittering vulnerability from emerging talent Noah Valentine as the boy, Alan Strang, while Toby Stephens flirts with hysteria as the shrink, Martin Dysart.

Posner’s stripped-back staging also features six hench and mostly silent lads in britches and smeary body makeup who stamp, shoulder-roll and nuzzle to evoke the horses. Young male actors all seem to have superhero bodies these days: parity at last for the exacting standards to which women have always been held, perhaps.

In Shaffer’s story, inspired by a true case he was told about but couldn’t trace, the friendless and isolated Strang becomes obsessed with horses after a deeply eroticised childhood canter with a stranger on a beach. His personality and emergent sexuality are suffocated by both his stuffily domineering printer dad, a self-improver who bans him from watching TV, and his genteel, fiercely religious mother.

Initially compelled by tortured Christian iconography, the boy evolves a sweatily muscular belief system around the horse-god Equus who is both slave and master, all-powerful but submissive. He gets a job at a stable and rides a stallion naked, orgasming on its flanks, at night. The chance of a real human connection with a stable girl, Jill (another impressive newcomer, Bella Aubin) triggers a crisis.

Noah Valentine (Alan Strang), Ed Mitchell (Nugget), Toby Stephens (Dr. Martin Dysart) (Manuel Harlan)

Alan is the star turn, or the star-making one: Peter Firth played him in the original production and the 1977 film and in 2007 Daniel Radcliffe, then at the height of his Harry Potter fame, took the part in the West End. Valentine brings a wiry, fragile intensity to the role.

But really this is about Dysart. Overworked, stuck in a loveless marriage and obsessed with the potent savagery of Greek myths, the psychiatrist’s faith in his drugs and rational techniques collapses in the face of Alan’s fierce belief. Yes, he tells the magistrate (Amanda Abbington) who referred the boy to him, Alan is in pain. But it’s *his* pain.

Here Shaffer taps into the views of analyst RD Laing, often described as “anti-psychiatry” (though he rejected the term) and into a wider, hazier countercultural notion that mental illness represents a rebellion against authority or convention. It’s interesting that Equus has been revived at the same time as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at the Old Vic, which has a queasily similar vibe: maybe it’s all the anti-establishment populism in the ether.

Stephens, in shades of brown and grey, and with a russet beard that looks like it could house birds, goes a bit too big too early as Dysart. The strain of testy exasperation that often creeps into his voice is there from the start. His Dysart is clearly at his wit’s end at the very beginning, and it leaves him with nowhere fresh to go. It’s not a bad performance, but an unvarying one. Dysart’s smoking habit is used as a period signifier, and he choffs down cigs like they’re going out of fashion.

Toby Stephens (Dr. Martin Dysart) and Noah Valentine (Alan Strang) (Manuel Harlan)

Equus is very much of its time – an early-70s world not only of Laing and the death of the 60s dream but also of “skin-flicks” in local cinemas, Pifco appliances, battleaxe nurses and up-for-it girlies. Alan counters Dysart’s early questioning by loudly singing jingles from Double Diamond and Martini ads.

Shaffer and his great collaborator, director John Dexter – who helped shape this play – were gay men born in the 1920s, who saw homosexuality partly decriminalized only in 1967. Alan may ostensibly present as straight but his sexual triggers are queer-coded. The play is partly about gazing and being observed and since its first staging, the expressionistic rendering of the horses has involved the glorification of lithe, hard male bodies.

Posner’s production does the same and embraces the play as a period piece, including its ridiculous moments (Alan’s invented equine scripture involves horses called Spunkus and Spankus, for example). It’s staged on a circle within a square, the six silently-seated horse-men surrounded by Gormley-esque cuboid walls pierced with rods. A fine revival of a deeply odd but significant play. The neighs still have it, it seems.

To 4 July, menierchocolatefactory.com.