Theatre review: Equus

Peter Shaffer's 1973 play Equus is a psychological thriller heavily inspired by the then-popular theories of R. D. Laing; the theories have long since been discredited but Equus remains popular, and Ned Bennett's new production for English Touring Theatre makes it clear why it still has something that resonates 46 years later. Martin Dysart (Zubin Varla) is a child psychiatrist convinced to add to his already-heavy workload because his friend, the magistrate Hester (Ruth Lass) thinks he's the only one who can give the boy a fair hearing. 17-year-old Alan Strang (Ethan Kai) has been sent to an institution after blinding six horses in the stables where he had a weekend job. When he meets the initially uncommunicative Alan, Dysart discovers a young man who rather than hating the animals he maimed, has had a lifelong love and fascination for them that tipped over into religious worship.

John Dexter's original production of Equus has always been closely associated with the play's aesthetic, and influenced how it's been staged subsequently: Shaffer himself was so enamoured with it and John Napier's design that the play's script recreates it in some detail in the stage directions (to the point that when I first read the play many years ago, before ever having seen it, it was downright hard to follow.)

Bennett must have started his work on the play by doing a lot of crossing out of stage directions, as he's been allowed to discard all the usual trappings and start afresh. I'm sure it's been staged without an onstage audience before, but notable by their absence here are the famous horse masks. Instead the actor/dancers playing horses (led by Ira Mandela Siobhan as Alan's favourite, Nuggett,) rely entirely on their physicality to suggest the animals: Bennett has created an opening that immediately draws you into the play's strange mysticism as Siobhan stands on the stage and transforms himself into the horse as Dysart describes Alan's love for him.

Georgia Lowe's set encloses the action in white curtains, a deceptively simple design that's used to evoke a dreamlike feel as characters and props suddenly appear through them, and shadows and movement in the fabric suggest things going on behind them; Varla uses the gaps in the curtains to usher in the next revelations he knows Alan is prepared to make in his treatment. While the set is nonspecific the costumes keep the story firmly in its 1970s setting; it makes sense as there's a lot of very specific references that would have to be changed or brushed over, and the story's universal themes go beyond the setting.

Speaking of revelations, Varla's Dysart is the production's biggest one. Ever since the 2007 production made the play famous as Daniel Radcliffe's stage debut, the focus has tended to be on the character of Alan (I remember at the time feeling that the late Richard Griffiths was just recycling Hector from The History Boys for his Dysart.) But Varla (who's looking more and more uncannily like David Suchet) puts the psychiatrist right back at the centre of what is, really, his story. Nervy, neurotic, with a slight speech impediment, he's clearly very good at his job as evidenced by his confident progress in his sessions with Alan, but as soon as he doesn't have to keep up that façade we see him weighed under by doubts as to whether what he's doing is actually helping the children he works with or, like Alan, wiping away a connection to something primal that he's always wished he could connect to himself.

Not that Kai isn't also impressive in the more showy role as the troubled teenager; he too has a public face, in his case cocky and unhelpful, through which the reality of how much he wants help clearly shows through. And he nails the unselfconscious vulnerability of one of the most famousFULL FRONTAL MALE NUDITY ALERT!scenes in theatre. This may be in part because of the decision to spare Norah Lopez Holden the usual accompanying female nudity: The unfortunate love interest Jill, who gets caught in the crossfire as Alan cracks, is suddenly awkward once it becomes apparent that something's wrong and stops undressing; it only highlights how far into his own world Alan has gone that he no longer notices his own nakedness.

Robert Fitch and Syreeta Kumar as the Strangs are so highly-strung in different ways that they seem unaware of how close they themselves are to a total breakdown - the elaborate mythology their son created and got lost in makes sense in context (although they're so poorly-matched that they themselves only make sense as a couple if a shotgun wedding was involved.) Making Alan's nurse (Keith Gilmore, also playing the stable-owner) male and physically imposing puts a tiny edge of danger to the antagonistic relationship between them (when Dysart tells Alan that if he hits Nurse he'll get hit back much harder that's less a joke, more a threat.) There are jokes in the play though and Bennett's found those too: To the smallest detail this feels like a genuine fresh look at a modern classic that both reinvents it and shows why it's transcended its origins, and can still get even a noisy audience to quickly go quiet and get sucked into the story.

Equus by Peter Shaffer is booking until the 23rd of March at the Theatre Royal Stratford East; then continuing on tour to Cambridge, Bath, Bristol, Salford, Newcastle and Guildford.

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: The Other Richard.