Word: equus
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...Equus. The show to catch if you're up to leaving Harvard this weekend. Peter Shaffer's powerful play gets a fine production here, with superb acting by Dai Bradley as a boy who goes around blinding horses and Brian Bedford as the cynical psychiatrist who tries to cure him. At the W ilbur Theater, 252 Tremont Street, through January 10. Performances every evening at 8 p.m., matinees W ednesday and Saturday...
...nervous father, shuffling about, pulling his hat round in circles between his thumb and forefinger. Bedford's performance is best, although it was marred last Friday night by a great deal of spluttering and spittle in enunciation. As narrator, Dysart controls most of the ironic pitch and timbre of Equus, and Bedford brings to the role the kind of laconic understatement that's necessary for it to succeed. In the Broadway production I saw last year, Anthony Hopkins, the original National Theater actor, seemed more effusive and self-confident. The irony was almost understated. But here, Bedford...
...Bradley as Alan has the most difficult role to play in Equus and he is outstanding. He must rely more on movement and facial expressions while being the center of attention for both the audience and the play's other characters. When he first appears on the stage he stares at Dysart, confused and questioning. And he doesn't quite seem to get this accusing look that Dysart later claims he puts on to say, "I have my passion... What's yours?" Not that this is inconsistent with Alan Strang's character. It seems more appropriate that he always...
WHAT IS FINALLY the most mysterious of all things in Equus--Alan need not be as opaque as he is at the end, but that serves the action and 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...
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...