Word: equus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...took Shaffer 2½ years to write Equus, the dazzling psychological thriller-about a boy who blinds six horses-that is now Broadway's rarest ticket. He had heard in 1972 about the incident on which the play is based. A stableboy had been brought before the magistrates in a rural part of England, accused of blinding with a poker the 26 horses he cared for. The story haunted Shaffer. He never tried to find out the actual details because "I'm not a journalist or a photographer." He is, however, a consummate technician. He delved into...
Queasy Subjects. Equus' triumph on Broadway is more than a personal one for Shaffer. It is also a tribute to the vitality of British theater. Once again this year Broadway has imported much of its excitement from London. Apart from Equus, the two most highly praised new plays are Alan Ayckbourn's farce Absurd Person Singular and Peter Nichols' black comedy The National Health. And next week the Royal Shakespeare Company's Sherlock Holmes will arrive from Washington, B.C., where it has played to record audiences...
...tuned to his audience's particular anxieties. He speaks of the modern struggle to live with ambiguities: the knowledge that any good course can be immediately opposed by another equally possible one. It is this constant weighing of trade-offs that forms Shaffer's conflicts. In Equus, the psychiatrist can cure the boy; he can exorcise his gods-demons, but he knows that in exchange he can offer only the dubious promise of "normality" and "adjustment...
...execution of Equus there are no ambiguities. Together with Director John Dexter and Set Designer John Napier, Shaffer has fashioned a spectacle dominated by horses: actors who bear on their heads equine masks and on their feet wear 6-in.-high hoofs that thud with the menace of a jungle drum. Shaffer has been fascinated by mask drama ever since he wrote The Royal Hunt of the Sun, about the conquistador Pizarro in Peru. At his suggestion, Inca funeral masks were worn by the Indians in the last act. "Nobody could think how they should look during Pizarro...
...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...