Word: passionlessness
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...drama itself was cunningly comprehensive, deploying its characters to arrive always at the right time for major events, like figures in 19th century novels heavy with coincidence. But for all its worthy exertions, the series at its core was curiously passionless. An accumulation of small anomalies diminished it. Dr. and Mrs. Weiss behaved with such genteel forbearance down to the last horror of the Zyklon B showers that their journey seemed like Mr. and Mrs. Miniver Go to Auschwitz. The lovers, Rudi and Helena, romped in the Ukraine wearing clothes that looked like peasant chic from Bloomingdale...
Dysart mostly reveals his problems of a passionless life to the magistrate, and Sheila Smith's acting--also more muted and restrained than in the Broadway production--helps throw his expression of the need for individual passions into greater relief. She scolds him sharply for even thinking of not curing Alan, saying "I'll take your skills over his passions any time." By being less sympathetic--making the rapport between she and Dysart less open--Shaffer's play gains more substance...
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...
...believable. Theresa's longer involvement with James, a lawyer, is both unpleasant and impossible, she decides, because he is too nice for her either to love or to enjoy sex with. Rossner fails to make James realistic--his appearances at Theresa's apartment are just too altruistic and passionless...
...back to that old puzzler, the "very difficult" problem of ethics. In the end that is what Wedding in Blood is all about. Audran and Piccolo are not just common lovers, they are the bourgeois world's version of Everywoman and Everyman. They are the passionate living in a passionless world. They want to be alive, to be rewarded, to be fulfilled--they want to be everything the great mass of desperates are not. Very difficult indeed. Certainly a problem that you can't run away from...