14 – 25 July
Peter Shaffer’s 1973 Toni-award winning play imagines the motivation behind the horrific, actual crime of the blinding of horses by a disturbed teenager. Shaffer’s play develops as an intellectual duel between child psychologist Dr Martin Dysart and the perpetrator, teenager Alan Strang, revealing both to having deeply uncomfortable inner lives. Emotional dysfunction and frustrated sexual expression lie at the heart of this tale and it is this that helps the play retain its context.
Toby Stephens plays the bearded, brown-suited Dysart. A man who is reaching an existential crisis of his own, Stephens brings a quiet desperation to the role, convincingly lapsing later into self-pity when confronting his own shortcomings which are briskly and refreshingly poo-pooed by his magistrate colleague, Hesther Saloman (Amanda Abbington).
The story of Equus really spins around and relies upon the tortured figure of Alan Strang, a 17-year old boy growing up between mis-matched parents. The role demands a simmering performance that conveys the most primal of urges but is dressed up in teenage bumptiousness. Noah Valentine stars in the role, amply portraying Strang’s passionate delusions, verging on the sexual, about the horses that have replaced his fetishistic interest in the crucifixion of Christ. Valentine has the capacity to show extreme vulnerability and a wily rage, presenting a lost soul, yet one who is given to romantic ideals. It is this that pulls the rug under Dysart, who seems to have lost his love for life. Strang is the mirror that tells him this. Why then should Dysart remove Alan’s ardour? What would he be without it?
On a predominantly darkened stage given Caravaggio-like points of light by designer Paul Pyant, Valentine’s sensual affinity to the horses, Nugget in particular, is given emphasis by the extraordinarily effective appearance and movements of the six hominid equines on stage. Matching Shaffer’s erotic descriptions of the boy stroking the neck and ribs of his favourite steed while taking in the smell of the beast’s sweat, so Ed Mitchell as Nuggett and Valentine’s nude Alan Strang begin a touching, balletic pas-de-deux loaded with sexual metaphor, giving the piece a broodingly gay quality.
Paul Farnsworth’s set was simple – a raised square acting area with a metal bench angled at each corner. Those that were not acting simply sat outside the square giving the impression that all still swirled around the story, even when out of it. There was a sombre soundscape from designer Alan Cork that featuring muffled, ominous drumming with dramatic emphasis to accentuate the occasional sudden movement of the horses.
There were excellent supporting roles. Emma Cuniffe brought an understandable desperation to Alan’s devoutly religious mother while Colin Mace painted his father Frank as a much gruffer, atheistic individual looking for sexual piquancy outside of his marriage. Alan’s girlfriend Jill Mason was played with a wholesome directness by Bella Aubin, who unwittingly triggers Alan’s crime by seeking sex with him within the anonymity of the stables where she and Alan worked.
Confronted by his ‘betrayal’ to his new ‘deity’ Equus, Alan is unable to countenance that his duplicity has been ‘seen’ by his ‘Almighty’. His anguished act of destroying the sight of the animals that are witness to his sexual awakening points to a deep-seated fear of life itself. And in this we can see Dr Dysart’s own desperation for something more passionate.
Director Lindsay Posner has made the most of a frantic and harrowing denouement as Alan Strang enacts his terrible deed and a stable of ruined horses run amok in a scene of devastation. Fuelled this time by strobe lighting – this is a piece of extraordinary theatre that can still shock.
As Dysart releases the teenager from his nightmares, his final words, revealing his own servitude to conformity, also reveal his own deep fear of banality.
★★★★☆ Simon Bishop, 15 July 2026
Photography credit: Manuel Harlan
