In the centenary year of his birth, the London stage is clamouring for works by Peter Shaffer, the Jewish playwright whose Oscar-winning screenplay for his play Amadeus (1979) still sets the gold standard for biopics.
Next year the drama returns to the West End and now as the Orange Tree Theatre hosts his one-act farce Black Comedy (1965), the Menier Chocolate Factory mounts Equus (1974), Shaffer’s deeply disturbing yet dramatically soaring foray into the troubled mind of 17-year-old Alan Strang (Noah Valentine), a stable boy who blinds the six horses he adores.
In this gripping production Toby Stephens plays Martin Dysart, the overworked child psychiatrist who is persuaded by Amanda Abbington’s concerned magistrate Hesther Salomon to take on the case.
For his second consecutive Chocolate Factory production, director Lindsay Posner drastically reconfigures the venue from the more conventional set-up that served his potent revival of Ryan Craig’s The Holy Rosenbergs, which explored the diaspora’s complicated relationship with Israel.
This time the playhouse is a crucible. With its thrust stage almost completely surrounded by the audience, it is a cauldron through which Strang’s victims, played by six young men who use nothing but brute strength and movement to portray the horses, surge like lava. Just as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman spills the mind of Willy Loman across its stage so Shaffer scatters young Strang’s secrets for Dysart to piece together like a detective.
They include the opposing forces of Strang’s parents Frank and Dora (Colin Mace and Emma Cunniffe), his determinedly atheistic father and domineering God-fearing mother. Then there are the posters on their son’s bedroom room wall that turned the boy’s devotion to his mother’s god into an obsession for something, well, four-legged.
The play’s narrator Stephens terrifically conveys Dysart’s world-weary conflict. Plagued by doubts triggered by the boy’s own talent for analysing his inquisitor, the psychiatrist sees in Strang the kind of passion that is absent in his own life and marriage. More than that, the shrink (to use a term prevalent in the 1970s when the play is set) is tormented by the thought of succeeding in his objective of turning Strang into a productive member of society. This in itself would be an act of destruction reasons Dysart during a soliloquy that drips with self-contempt.
Still, you can’t go around blinding horses is the obvious point that Abbington’s magistrate never quite makes with her impassioned reassurances.
Meanwhile, Valentine should win awards for a performance whose rage and vulnerability courses through every inch of his sinewy body. And so collectively should the brilliant lads whose horses embody the suppressed primeval corners of our psyche.
Equus
Menier Chocolate Factory
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