The Theater: Freudian Exorcism

EQUUS

by PETER SHAFFER

Shining, it was Adam and maiden ...

So it must have been after the birth

of the simple light

In the first, spinning place, the

spellbound horses walking warm

Out of the whinnying green stable

On to the fields of praise.

—Fern Hill, Dylan Thomas

In Equus, it is the Old Adam and night, and six horses are wheeling in terror. They have been blinded by a 17-year-old boy wielding a metal spike. Spurred by this lacerating image, Peter Shaffer has fashioned a galvanizing psychological thriller.

It is also a Manhattan cocktail-party play, the sort of drama that shoots adrenaline into people's tongues and makes ticket scalpers' fingers itch in anticipation. T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party was just such a play. So was J.B. and A Man for All Seasons and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? These plays have one thing in common. They roar through an evening with blazing dramatic pyrotechnics. On the following dawn, the embers of their dubious intellectual premises will scarcely bear analysis.

But playgoers dearly cherish a theatrical hypo, and Broadway desperately needed an Equus. Almost as desperately as did Richard III. Why has this boy done this horrendous thing? The structure of the play is like that of a trial in which the witness and culprit, Alan Strang (Peter Firth), is coaxed, tricked and thundered at by a prosecuting psychiatrist, Martin Dysart (Anthony Hopkins). In a way, Dysart is a physician who cannot heal himself. At the Rokeby Psychiatric Hospital in southern England, he is a skeptical practitioner of Freudian exorcism. He is a devotee of reason yearning for Dionysian revels. He has a loveless marriage with a wife he has not even kissed in six years. He pores over pictures of Greek gods and tries to get close to pagan worship on vacations in the Peloponnesus.

At first, all that Dysart can get out of Alan is inane TV commercial jingles. But as the interrogation proceeds and Alan relives key aspects of his life, Dysart realizes that the boy has not only a passion for horses but also a consuming belief that they are gods. Thus to relieve the boy of his guilty torment will simultaneously rob him of his deity. What price normality? At the end of Act 1, Alan is riding his favorite steed, Nugget (Everett McGill), in an orgiastic frenzy that could be defined as a sexual climax or as "union with God," depending on the way one chooses to look at it.

The horses, by the way, are simply tall men in chestnut track suits. On their feet are strutted hooves about 4 in. high. On their heads are airy, stylized masks of interlaced leather and silver wire. These possess such hieratic dignity and beauty that a special citation should be awarded Scenery Designer and Costumer John Napier. How could these noble animals be maimed by a boy who revered them? For answers, Playwright Shaffer digs into his rather voluminous bag of stereotypes. Alan's mother is a frigid religious hysteric, compellingly played by Frances Sternhagen.