Word: firth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...structure and language, but Equus' main drawback is its philosophical thrust. Like so many other trendy writers, from R.D. 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...
...Elizabeth Ashley returned triumphantly in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The British sent over a generation of stars, including Alec McCowen and Diana Rigg playing together with the finesse of the Lunts in The Misanthrope, John Wood portraying a rapier-sharp Sherlock Holmes, Anthony Hopkins and Peter Firth in the psychological tour de force Equus. Even Liv Ullmann turned up, though in a disappointing production of A Doll's House; her presence gave the season an extra glow...
...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 passion and energy into their roles than you can find in half a dozen revivals of "Where's Charley?" Hopkins (who played Pierre Bezoukhov in the BBC War and Peace) spits his words into the air with tortured eloquence. Firth bounds from...
...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. 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...