Word: stableboy
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ever there was a play that has no business being a movie, Equus is it. This drama about a stableboy's crime of passion owed much of its three-year Broadway run to theatrical devices that cannot be reproduced on film. Strip the stagecraft away, and all that remains of Equus is 2% hours of talky debate about shopworn ideas. The poor play stumbles and falls before it can break from the gate...
...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...
Read's Heathcliff is not a stableboy but a contemporary Yorkshire parson's son who sulks because God did not make him an aristocrat. At times, an American reader is hard put to take Hil ary Fletcher's miseries as solemnly as he does himself- even if one grants that a second-rate British public school is "worse than prison" and that hell knows no torment like an Englishman at the hunt ball whose jacket fails to fit. Alas, The Upstart stipulates that exactly this sort of class embarrassment can still drive a dated Angry Young...