Word: equus
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...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...
...always to be encouraged: Carried away by the eloquence of a speech, the virtuosity of an actor and the logic of a situation, the audience not only suspends its disbelief but the whole set of daily values it lives by and, for the moment, accepts alien ones. Equus isn't meant as an incitement to madness, but as a reminder that things are more complicated than our habits would seem to show we think them. After all, we don't really want people around blinding horses by the half dozen...
...horses are played by lithe men in brown corduroy, with soldered skeletons of horse's hooves and pullover horse's heads. Everything works, except for the use of loudspeakers to amplify the horse's cries; but these aren't used often enough to damage much of the action. Equus is far more adventurous theatrically than intellectually, and that shouldn't be held against it. In many ways, Equus is simply a good old-fashioned play; Dysart is not too unlike the detective who solves a crime because that's his job but wonders whether he was right to turn...
...only thing Equus lacks is a sense of what it is like to be mad. Firth shows us energetically enough what it looks like to be mad, but Shaffer doesn't give him a chance to tell what he feels. The boy's passion may be more intense than anything Dysart has ever known, but such a passion, attractive from the outside, may be a burden to those who have to live with it, a source of more pain than exaltation. Maybe there are some kinds of creativity that are not self-destructive and cruel. Shaffer's play, with...
...Equus is currently playing at New York's Plymouth Theater...