Word: strangely
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...thing; the boy is so absorbed in his world that he reaches a level of emotional intensity unavailable to more ordinary men and women. So long as the psychosis remains benign, it is not discovered and poses no problem for anyone; one night, though, the boy, Alan Strang, blinds six of the horses he has been working with at a stable in rural England. The local magistrate, a woman of uncommon compassion but complacent confidence in official definitions of sanity, places him in the hands of a psychiatrist, Martin Dysart. The boy's "cure" is the center of the play...
...Strang's creative energies are lodged part and parcel with his strange psychosis, and its exorcism leaves him an empty shell, incapable of anything one-hundredth as passionate as before. This is the play's point, and it's not a new one and this isn't its most profound presentation. That madness may be better than sanity--who are we, who have never known true madness, to judge--goes back as far as you want to take it into Western thought. What Equus does is make it into good theater. Shaffer's play is propaganda for the Dionysiac element...
...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 the catatonic...
...purest, strongest experiences. Shaffer sets up the Apollonian and Dionysiac sides of man in bald opposition. He weighs the comparison by opposing a hygienic professional without strong sexual drives (whose chief pleasure is paging through coffee-table books about ancient Greece) to a barely literate whirlwind of adolescent lust. Strang worships his horse-god every night and knows that his worship is accepted; he whips himself with a horse's whip, sets a bridle in his mouth, kisses the hooves of his god and licks the sweat off his face...
Shaffer is guilty only of creating a middle ground, somewhere between the simplistic views of his audience and the kind of complexity that never works on stage except in Shakespeare. Shaffer's portrayal of Strang's parents reveal him at his weakest. The father is a self-proclaimed atheist and Marxist, but a sternly Puritan advocate of the work ethic, who, it turns out, is also a patron of dirty movies. The mother is an indulgent Christian who takes the first opportunity to renounce any responsibility she may bear for her son's condition: Alan was a fine boy until...