The horror itself has already happened before Peter Shaffer’s Equus opens: 17-year-old Alan Strang has brutally blinded six horses. The crux of the play is why, and child psychiatrist Dr Martin Dysart is tasked with finding out.
Puzzle pieces of memory slowly assemble a picture: a childhood split between a mother’s fervent religion and a father’s rigid atheism, and a boyhood fascination with graphic depictions of Christ’s suffering. Then a chance encounter with a horse swells into something else entirely – a private nighttime ritual fusing religious ecstasy with sexual awakening.
It builds to a single night when desire, guilt, and a jealous god collide in the stable. The deeper Dysart digs, the more his own job curdles into something darker.
Lindsay Posner’s production takes place within the stark bareness of Paul Farnsworth’s set: a simple raised square, anchored by metal benches at each corner. Cast members sit among the stalls as silent onlookers, stepping into the playing arena only when required.
Equus review – quick links
A psychiatrist with a troubling case
Toby Stephens is magnificent as the rumpled, bearded psychiatrist undergoing his own existential crisis, bringing a quiet desperation to a man taunted by his own perceived banality. When magistrate Hesther Saloman (an empathic Amanda Abbington) brings him the case, Dysart’s professional detachment begins to fracture.
As Alan, newcomer Noah Valentine delivers a taut, sinewy performance charting the journey from blank-eyed aggression to fearful revelation. Caught between his mismatched parents – played with excellent friction by Colin Mace and Emma Cunniffe – Valentine’s Alan is vulnerable, infantile and perverted: an uncomfortable and compelling combination.
Movement director James Cousins finds a captivating, unsettling intimacy in the horses’ physicalisation. Six bare-chested actors, streaked with black, move with an astonishing, unerringly angular grace. The first act climaxes with a naked Alan engaged in an almost balletic pas-de-deux with the majestic head horseman, Nugget (a charismatic Ed Mitchell), bathed in Caravaggio-like points of light and set against a darkened stage.
Here, Posner forces the audience to become Alan, just for a moment, experiencing the same palpable ecstatic, transgressive charge he is chasing, followed quickly by an uncomfortable, swallowing shame.
Challenging decisions
If there’s a flaw keeping this from a full five stars, it’s not Posner’s staging – it’s Equus’ awkwardness when seen through a modern lens. Equus was written in the 1970s when scepticism of psychiatry was fashionable, even radical; Dysart’s reluctance to ‘cure’ Alan read then as a genuinely difficult moral position.
Watching now, it reads closer to a blind spot. This is a child in crisis, gripped by a delusion that has isolated him from every normal register of life and driven him to horrific violence he never wanted to commit – and Dysart’s hesitation is framed less as tragedy than as envy of a marriage gone stale. It’s hard to sit with a psychiatrist who seems more interested in preserving a symptom than saving a patient.
And yet Equus doesn’t need Dysart to be right to still work. Whatever audiences make of Dysart’s conclusion, something remains inescapably disturbing about watching a teenage boy speak of an animal in openly sexual terms, or about watching him naked on the shoulders of a bare-chested actor playing that same animal. Shaffer’s argument may have dated. The discomfort of his imagery has not.
As the curtain fell on this Bath opening night and the standing ovation turned into a tide of theatregoers leaving, murmurs from first-time Equus viewers and returners alike could be overheard making the same private refrain – how bizarre. It’s a testament to Shaffer’s imagining and Posner’s reimagining that audiences still leave Equus in that same state of conflicted astonishment, 50 years on. Equus remains a wild and unforgettable ride.
