Peter Shaffer's rarely performed masterpiece, Equus, tells the story of Alan Strang, a 17 year old boy who, after living a suffocating and stifling life at home with a puritanical socialist father and an uber-religious mother, and struggling with his own adolescence and sexual feelings, is driven to blind six horses in the stables where he works with a metal spike.
One of the magistrates convicting him sees something in him - perhaps that he is wanting to be saved (although saved from what?) - that she manages to sway the court into allowing him to be ttreated by the only child psychiatrist she knows who wouldn't be revulsed by his actions. However, the said psychiatrist is also battling his own demons, locked in a loveless and childless marriage, and this brings him to question both the value of his own job and at what cost restoring Alan to 'normality' will bring.
Ned Bennett's production for English Touring Theatre is very stripped back and has a hugely copntemporary feel, despite the play being somewhat dated now. A bare stage with clinical white drapes on the three sides serves for most of the play with only single and pertinent items brought on when necessary. Gone are the 'traditional' horse heads, gone is the Brechtian feel to the piece and the cast on stage throughout, gone is any indication of 'set' or 'place' in the accepted theatrical sense. Instead for the horses, we are given physical peformers who use their muscles in creative ways, the movements crafted superbly. This is especially evident in the movement of Nugget (Ira Mandela Siobhan) and since the horses are bare chested and 'human', there is a vastly increased sexuality between horse and rider which both movement director Shelley Maxwell and Bennett use to the max. Instead of set we are given many more LX and sound effects than usual. In this regard the play felt very cinematic or TV Soap Opera-like, inasmuch as we were now being 'told' how we should be feeling and how to emote by clever use of effects in much the same way music and cinematography does. For me, a play such as this, where the words themselves are superbly crafted, needs nothing in the way of embellishment except excellent actors to deliver the words.
This leads me very nicely on to a minor, but for me, vitally important point. I simply did not understand why the dialogue had been changed for this production. The omission of 'beeswax' in the phrase, 'Mind your own beeswax' was just one example of heavy-handed, unnecessary, and seemingly arbitrary changes in the script. Admittedly they were few and far between, but were nonetheless there.
The actors had clearly invested a huge amount of their selves into their roles, and in the main this paid dividend. Ethan Kai's Alan Strang looked too old and was too self-aware to be truly effective in the role, and the stylised direction didn't help him in this regard either.Zubin Varla as the psychatrist Dysart was suitably world-weary and unprepossessing, constantly chain-smoking, a slight speech impediment and wearing brown corduroy, but he never seemed to convey enough passion and stayed very much middle-of-the-road the entire play. In fact, the only performance which truly came across as real and naturalistic for me was that of Norah Lopez Holden as Jill. She came into the play as a breath of fresh air from a rather stagnant and very samey exposition.
The production as a whole focused on the sexuality more than the religion, and Bennett's direction certainly seemed to give the whole a very homo-erotic or even bestially erotic flavour, which I have never seen in this play before.
If you plan on seeing this play while it is still at The Lowry (there until Saturday 27th), then be prepared for a late finish. It starts at 8pm and it is a rather long 2 hours 40 minutes.
Reviewer - Matthew Dougall
on - 23/4/19
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