Word: equus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first thing you notice about Equus--sometime between the first garbled summary of its plot and the first couple of minutes of its spellbinding action--is how incredibly well Peter Shaffer has turned his dismal raw material (which he insists is a true story) into a play that works so well it hurts. A teenage boy is "possessed" by the spirit of Equus, the horse-god he creates, worships and fastens his sexual energies to. This possession is not altogether a bad thing; the boy is so absorbed in his world that he reaches a level of emotional intensity unavailable...
...point, and it's not a new one and this isn't its most profound presentation. That madness may be better than sanity--who are we, who have never known true madness, to judge--goes back as far as you want to take it into Western thought. What Equus does is make it into good theater. Shaffer's play is propaganda for the Dionysiac element in human nature, with a rhetorical impact that outweighs its criticism of psychiatric assumptions. Shaffer doesn't take the extreme position of many modern playwrights, that madness is better than sanity; he only goes...
...best thing about Equus, though, isn't these kind of reflections. It's an actor's play, a classic confrontation that sometimes seems to come close to genres like the medical drama and the detective mystery. The case history becomes a sort of whodunit in which the psychiatrist discovers the origins of the crime in the boy's upbringing, in which new psychiatric clues, like the picture of a horse that replaced a print of a suffering Christ, enjoy the same status as, say, the murder weapon in a Perry Mason. Peter Firth (Strang) and Anthony Hopkins (Dysart) put more...
...EQUUS. The bizarre saga of a boy who blinds six horses with a metal spike. Galvanically theatrical, albeit specious in substance. The boy (Peter Firth) and his psychiatrist (Anthony Hopkins) give performances in the megaton range...
...results were rewarding. People asked Shaffer how he got the masks to change their expressions. "They hadn't, of course," said Shaffer. "But the audience invested so much emotion in the play that it looked as if they had." Many of the audience at Equus react similarly: they claim they see the horses' eyes roll. That to Shaffer is the fulfillment of his job. "The playwright must exercise the audience's muscle, its imagination...