EQUUS | STAGE REVIEW
Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff
Equus starts with a description of a horrific act of violence, ends with a graphic depiction of that act, and in between the audience is asked to question what leads a person to act in such a way.
The structure of the play is that of a detective story: we know the crime and the identity of the culprit from the beginning, but the motive unfolds through a series of flashbacks and vignettes, as characters come onstage to offer the audience some new piece of information.
Everyman Theatre are adept at staging challenging plays (a performance of Good several years ago was a particular stand out) and this production is no exception. The direction handles the complex chronological structure of the play well, and the depiction of the horses themselves and the final climatic scene are effective and well-realised.
Henry Nott turns in a fine performance as Alan Strang. He shows a character who is at once malevolent and sensitive, capable of violence, but also wounded by the psychic violence of others. One of the strengths of Nott’s performance is his portrayal of Strang’s journey from advertising-jingle-quoting catatonia to a fully realised and sympathetic individuality.
Steven Smith gives a solid performance as psychiatrist Martin Dysart; a doctor much given to soliloquies and musings on ancient Greek religion. Dysart is, in effect, the audience surrogate, there to tie the narrative together and attempt to explicate Strang’s actions. Smith gives us a character who doubts his vocation and is exhausted by his own questioning, but is unable to ever stop questioning.
By showing us Strang’s interactions with the other characters in the play Shaffer offers the audience what might be called a palimpsest theory of human identity. The audience watches as Strang is overwritten with his mother’s religious fervour, his father’s communist ideals and Dysart’s own theories about the nature of authenticity. And this is where the problem lies: Dysart presents Strang’s blinding of the horses as an authentic response to the banal conformity of consumerist society. Is Shaffer really asking the audience to believe that unspeakable cruelty is justified by the need for individuality in an increasingly homogeneous society? Even the most fervent of Nietzsche’s disciples would surely balk at that.
This kind of thing probably went down well in the early seventies, the era of RD Laing’s anti-psychiatry, but now it appears a tad naïve, to say the least. At just over 40 years old, the cultural and ideological timbers underpinning Peter Schaffer’s psycho-sexual nightmare are starting to creak a little.
words DAVID GRIFFITHS
Equus, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Thurs 22-Sat 24 May. Tickets: £8-£10. Info: www.chapter.org