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Author
Peter Shaffer
Director
Thea Sharrock
Alan
Strang
Daniel Radcliffe
Martin
Dysart
Richard Griffiths
Hesther
Saloman
Jenny Agutter
Jill
Joanna Christie
Nugget
Will Kemp
Other
performers
Jonathan Cullen
Colin Haigh
Karen Meagher
Gabrielle Reidy
Greig Cooke
Joel Corpuz
Temujin Gill
Jami Quarrell
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Gielgud
Theatre
16
Feb - 11 June 2007 |
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Equus,
when it first appeared in
1973, was promulgating a current
fad. According to then-fashionable
psychologists R D Laing and
David Cooper, insanity is
what fuels art and religion,
and is kin to ecstasy and
genius. In so far, therefore,
as psychiatry or psychoanalysis
cure madness, this may be
at too heavy a cost. 'Passion,
you see, can be destroyed
by a doctor. It cannot be
created.' So muses Laing-inspired
Martin Dysart, the psychiatrist
in Equus,
while treating Alan Strang,
a 17 year-old who has blinded
six horses. Dysart laments
that, in order to take away
the boy's pain, he will have
to take away his 'worship'
and 'passion' also. Other
seventies plays, such as Mary
Barnes by David Edgar, which
dealt with a Laingian-type
'therapeutic community', similarly
sang the unbridling of madness.
34 years after its first staging,
Equus
is being revived at the Gielgud
Theatre, and the programme-notes,
and most reviews, insist that
the play has not dated. Indeed
the 80-something year-old
Shaffer has catered for time
by making 'minor rewrites'.
But should there be more replacements
than 'con' for 'swizz'? Certainly
Richard Griffiths is authentically
urbane, astute and confused
as the psychiatrist, and his
counterparts in reality are
still liable to the same swings
between paternalism and humility.
Daniel Radcliffe (famous for
his role as Harry Potter)
is convincingly bruised and
sullen as Alan Strang, and
his sexual torments and timidity
are, almost surprisingly,
still quite timely. But there
is something oddly old-fashioned
about this rendition of a
17 year-old like Alan, which
is not Radcliffe's fault but
the script's, and due to the
changing of the times. A contemporary
Alan would surely be a lot
more resentful and foul-mouthed,
and have mastered a great
deal more psychoanalytic jargon
with which to belabour his
analyst. And unlike the magistrate
Heather Saloman (acted by
Jenny Agutter), we no longer
think that the blinding of
six horses, horrible though
it is, is the 'most horrific
thing I have ever heard'.
We are fattened up to sickness
with horrifying stories of
what children younger than
Alan get up to.
Which is why, ultimately,
the play is so disappointing.
If its ideas don't seem dated,
it's because they are hackneyed.
For the last thirty odd years
since it was first staged,
there have been endless plays,
novels and declamations which
similarly applaud madness
as an ineluctable part of
genius and hanker for nature,
authenticity, the primitive.
Even in the seventies such
ideas were already hackneyed
- Laing et al were simply
and simplistically rehashing
Romanticism, and its peans
to wilderness and wildness.
No reason of course why the
cost of civilisation should
not be expressed and debated,
why Shaffer's shrink should
not mourn that the horse-blinder
will have to be dethroned
from his fierce charger of
religious passion and reseated
on a tame scooter of staid
rule-keeping. But, given the
endlessness of such a debate,
it had better be good. What
Equus
ignores is that asocial wildness
is more likely to consort
with orthodoxy and mass hysteria
than with individualism and
creativity. Ionesco, victim
of both Nazism and Communism,
saw this clearly ‚ the characters
in his play Rhinoceros (first
staged in 1959) hanker for
'primeval integrity' and the
law of the jungle to replace
moral laws. Only the character
who insists on the irreplaceablity
of values which have taken
centuries of human civilization
to build up, remains human;
one by one, the others transform
into rhinoceroses. 'Back to
the swamp!' Rather like the
rebestialsimg of young men
who kill for 'respect' or
for gang-identity, or whose
religious passion drives them
to blow up themselves and
others.
Jane O'Grady |
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