Theatre review: Equus

30 years after graduating I still feel compelled to see the four plays I worked on in my directing module at university, whenever I hear of one being revived somewhere I can get to. Now on the fourth production of it I've seen, Equus easily has the top spot of most regularly revived. I'd originally planned to make a Peter Shaffer-themed weekend of it last week, but when the Sunday performance at the Menier was cancelled I had to reschedule - I guess two Saturdays in a row is still a themed season of a kind. Last week Black Comedy was very much a throwback to the 1960s, and Equus is very much rooted in the 1970s both in its references and in the countercultural R.D. Laing psychiatric theories that inspired it, so why does it seem to hold up better? Lindsay Posner's production certainly keeps the original setting, from the otherwise long-forgotten advertising jingles to the child psychiatrist smoking in sessions with his patient.

Toby Stephens plays Dr Martin Dysart, who takes on the case of 17-year-old Alan Strang (Noah Valentine,) a previously unpreposessing boy who, seemingly out of nowhere, blinded six horses at the stables where he worked. As Dysart uses various techniques to get to the truth, he starts to wonder if "curing" the boy is to actually deprive him of a primal connection the psychiatrist himself wishes he could access.

I try to approach each version of a familiar play afresh, but I was very aware that I'd left Ned Bennett's 2019 production feeling as if I'd seen the play with new eyes, and that this one would have a lot to do to match that. It doesn't - in many ways it feels like a pretty standard retelling of the story, although it definitely does have an angle that it focuses on. It doesn't quite resurrect the onstage seating from the original production that Shaffer was so enamoured by, but with Paul Farnsworth's thrust stage with benches as the only furniture, and most of the cast spending their offstage time sitting among the audience, there's certainly more than a nod to the conceit.

Where it does feel like there's been a specific focus is the homoeroticism in the story. I heard one audience member during the interval complaining that the overt homoeroticism had been tacked on, which I definitely don't agree with: Even on the page, it's a gay writer telling a story about a young man who can't perform sexually with a woman because he's being watched by the object of his worship, played by a group of half-naked male ballet dancers, clearly nothing queer about that.

Still, it has been heightened here. For better or worse, one of the things Equus is best known for is its extendedFULL FRONTAL MALE NUDITY ALERT!at the climax, but Posner goes against the text and has Valentine strip off not once but twice. (Shaffer specified that at the end of the first act Alan doesn't get fully naked but does at the end of the second, to show that the latter time is when he fully commits to "abreacting" his experience.) As he's riding the shoulders of the actor playing the horse Nugget, there may have been the practical issue there as well of the actors having to make so much intimate contact - something that only really occured to me watching this version where Valentine spends the scene with his genitals resting on the back of Ed Mitchell's neck, Intimacy Coordinator Clare Foster really earning her paycheck here.

By contrast in the final violent scene Alan and Jill (Bella Aubin) stay clothed for their unsuccessful sexual encounter, Valentine only getting naked again when he confronts the men playing the horses he worships. Mitchell and the other five dancers (Luke Hodkinson, Aristide Lyons, Zach Parkin, Tommi Sutton and Moses Ward) are a strong physical presence throughout the play, often joining together to form one giant horse-god, and again James Cousins' movement direction doesn't hold back on the skin-on-skin contact.

The other thing that I found notable about the production was that Colin Mace and Emma Cunniffe as Frank and Dora Strang really do seem like the much older parents that they're described as, which I don't remember coming across as strongly before. They're out of their depth dealing with a teenager but this also explains at least some part of why Alan grew up quite so otherworldly and detached from his peers.

The downside of focusing so strongly on the homoeroticism and physicality of the story is that the part where it bleeds into a twisted sense of religion isn't as much under the spotlight, and Stephens' Dysart isn't distinct enough in his own mental breakdown to make us see how this is important. It means that, where I always read the psychiatrist as being the central character on the page, this production takes us back to Alan at the heart of the story, and Valentine does give us nuance as the teenager starts to reveal himself psychologically as well as physically.

Equus by Peter Shaffer is booking until the 4th of July at the Menier Chocolate Factory, then from the 14th to the 25of of July at the Theatre Royal Bath.

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.