Word: dysart
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Laing to Ken Kesey, Shaffer wonders whether madness may be a greater virtue than sanity in a sterile modern world. In Equus, madness is personified by Alan Strang (Peter Firth), a pretty, blond youth whose sexual desire for horses drives him to blind them; sanity takes the form of Dysart (Richard Burton), a repressed psychiatrist charged with curing Alan of his antisocial passion. In this confrontation between a virile equussexual and an impotent prune, can there be any doubt as to who will emerge the moral victor...
...exchanges between Equus 'antagonists are scarcely more exciting. Firth's performance, seemingly so natural in a theater, looks artificial in closeup. Burton provides a curiously bland Dysart who lacks the high-pitched emotional constipation that both Anthony Hopkins and Alec McCowen brought to stage productions. Lumet tries to save the day by flooding Burton's speeches with melodramatic lighting and music, but no such makeshift remedy can cure Equus of its congenital limp. - Frank Rich
...films and with Michael York in last year's Hollywood science-fiction fantasy Logan's Run. Now comes Equus, Sidney Lumet's film of the long-running Broadway psychodrama. Jenny, 24, plays a pert stablehand who tries to seduce the troubled young patient of Psychiatrist Martin Dysart (Richard Burton). In the film, as on Broadway, that scene is played au naturel, which doesn't bother Jenny, since she considers it "necessary for the story." Says she: "As soon as you start covering up, as soon as you start avoiding the nakedness, it becomes a bit naughty...
...suspense--is what people want for Alan Strang. His mother wants him to be happy and religious, his father wants him to improve his character, his girlfriend just wants him to be able to toss in the hay with her, the magistrate wants him to be without pain, and Dysart wants him to retain his passion--or at least toys with the idea. And it is in Dysart that this desire to see the boy different than what he can become--not just dull--that the dangers arise of wanting any child to be something. Dysart plays...
Lurking beneath this tugging and pulling a child to become something, is the most deadly of all passions in Equus, more deadly than the dull, passionless society Dysart depicts. Alan Strang probably wouldn't have been in the world he was if he hasn't been thrust there by a society that pushes people into a frame of being without helping them understand the dimensions of their own roles in that society or of all the emotions they will experience: pain and pleasure, virtue and vice, boredom and passion. Equus helps a little in that direction, and while it could...