Freudian Exorcism
By T.E.K.
EQUUS
by PETER SHAFFER
Shining, it was Adam and maiden ...
So it must have been after the birth
of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the
spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
--Fern Hill, Dylan Thomas
In Equus, it is the Old Adam and night, and six horses are wheeling in terror. They have been blinded by a 17-year-old boy wielding a metal spike. Spurred by this lacerating image, Peter Shaffer has fashioned a galvanizing psychological thriller.
It is also a Manhattan cocktail-party play, the sort of drama that shoots adrenaline into people's tongues and makes ticket scalpers' fingers itch in anticipation. T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party was just such a play. So was J.B. and A Man for All Seasons and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? These plays have one thing in common. They roar through an evening with blazing dramatic pyrotechnics. On the following dawn, the embers of their dubious intellectual premises will scarcely bear analysis.
But playgoers dearly cherish a theatrical hypo, and Broadway desperately needed an Equus. Almost as desperately as did Richard III. Why has this boy done this horrendous thing? The structure of the play is like that of a trial in which the witness and culprit, Alan Strang (Peter Firth), is coaxed, tricked and thundered at by a prosecuting psychiatrist, Martin Dysart (Anthony Hopkins). In a way, Dysart is a physician who cannot heal himself. At the Rokeby Psychiatric Hospital in southern England, he is a skeptical practitioner of Freudian exorcism. He is a devotee of reason yearning for Dionysian revels. He has a loveless marriage with a wife he has not even kissed in six years. He pores over pictures of Greek gods and tries to get close to pagan worship on vacations in the Peloponnesus.
At first, all that Dysart can get out of Alan is inane TV commercial jingles. But as the interrogation proceeds and Alan relives key aspects of his life, Dysart realizes that the boy has not only a passion for horses but also a consuming belief that they are gods. Thus to relieve the boy of his guilty torment will simultaneously rob him of his deity. What price normality? At the end of Act 1, Alan is riding his favorite steed, Nugget (Everett McGill), in an orgiastic frenzy that could be defined as a sexual climax or as "union with God," depending on the way one chooses to look at it.
The horses, by the way, are simply tall men in chestnut track suits. On their feet are strutted hooves about 4 in. high. On their heads are airy, stylized masks of interlaced leather and silver wire. These possess such hieratic dignity and beauty that a special citation should be awarded Scenery Designer and Costumer John Napier. How could these noble animals be maimed by a boy who revered them? For answers, Playwright Shaffer digs into his rather voluminous bag of stereotypes. Alan's mother is a frigid religious hysteric, compellingly played by Frances Sternhagen.
Alan's father is a do-gooding socialist printer and a self-righteous authoritarian moralist who gets his after-hours kicks at skin flicks. At the stable where he works on weekends, Alan is sexually aroused by a pert, enticing co-employee (Roberta Maxwell). In a nude scene that precedes the play's climax, they try to make love but Alan falters. He feels that the eyes of his gods watch and condemn him. Then the horror begins.
With consummate theatrical brio, Shaffer has attuned the audience to some of its deepest desires--sin, guilt, confession, atonement and a degree of redemption. Dare one say that he has also blinded the audience to his exaltation of deranged violence as religious passion and his derogation of civilizing reason as hollow passivity?
In a superb cast, two performers are in the megaton range. Peter Firth makes Alan a fallen angel of anguish, and Anthony Hopkins' psychiatrist is a tour de force that should make any other Tony contender blanch.
T.E.K
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