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4 March 2007The Sunday Times
ONCE again, Daniel Radcliffe plays a boy with access to a secret world, and to hidden powers, of which the conventional adults around him have no idea nor any understanding.
All right, no more Harry Potter jokes, I promise. For one thing, the similarities between Alan Strang, the tormented adolescent protagonist of Equus, and Radcliffe’s more famous Harry Potter really do stop there. Harry might be an annoying little tyke, at times, but he has never blinded six horses with a spike. More seriously, Peter Shaffer’s Equus is without doubt a play that deserves to be treated with respect. In fact, for all its faults, this extraordinary and sometimes horrifying story of a horse-worshipping, horsemutilating teenager, and his eventual “cure” by a psychiatrist, Dr Martin Dysart, remains one of the great English postwar plays – although there is something deeply, refreshingly un-English in its seriousness, passion and commitment. There are no diverting flippancies or light, dancing ironies here. Instead, there’s an almost Germanic earnestness in the way Shaffer asks the question at the heart of his drama, a question about as big as they get.
We used to believe in God. Now we don’t. In consequence, what are we like? There is no greater question to demand of modern secular society, and in a culture that treats religion with the staggering juvenility of The Da Vinci Code, Equus matters. There is the added historical irony, which Shaffer could not have foreseen when the play first appeared in 1973, that our too cosily secular, materialist culture has been shaken, some three decades later, by gangs of Alan Strangs: disaffected youths who think in a religious idiom terrible and strange, and yearn to make blood sacrifices on buses and trains, with backpacks of explosives.
Given this seriousness and weight, could Radcliffe possibly be up to portraying Alan Strang – strong, strange – having barely stepped on stage before, his previous acting experience consisting principally of the likeable but hardly challenging role of a bespectacled schoolboy wizard? The answer is a resounding yes. Radcliffe is mesmerising, capturing all of Strang’s weird charisma, his rage, his silently burning intensity, his accusatory stare, his mystery, his “keep out of my private sacred space” hatred. His modest stature only accentuates the child at the heart of his adolescent agonies, yet he is also powerfully wound up and sinewy, and his startlingly large, soulful eyes are a big asset, given the story line.
As a work of art, Equus is magnificent, though not perfect. Dysart talks too much, is too florid, too obviously Shaffer at times, haranguing his comfortable, middle-class, theatre-going audience. But Richard Griffiths is a joy in the role, talking about his work in “the adjustment business” with a screwed-up, mirthless little smile, fluttering his plump hands, a man weary of his own lack of conviction, his ludicrous, bookish enthusiasm for classical paganism. “Some pagan! Three weeks a year in the Peloponnese, every bed booked in advance, every meal paid for in vouchers… and he [Strang] stands in the dark for an hour, sucking the sweat off his God’s hairy cheek.” As he finally admits, he is jealous of Alan Strang. Dysart may be an educated, gentle and humane modern man, but he is virtually paralysed with disillusion.
There are good performances, too, from Jonathan Cullen and Gabrielle Reidy as Alan’s bewildered parents, while Joanna Christie has an exceptional naturalness and believability as Jill the seductive stablegirl. In one of the few minor changes, the horses themselves have lost the “tracksuits of chestnut velvet” originally stipulated by the playwright, which now sound horribly like something you would see in Primark. Instead, the performers show off their musculature in tight-fitting T-shirts, while keeping the stunning metal hooves and horses’ heads originally designed by John Napier in 1973, and moving beautifully throughout, a shaman’s dream of horseness. Add to all these top-notch performances such unforgettable tableaux as Radcliffe mounted up and crying out in his ecstasy, his skinny torso stretched out as if crucified under the pouring white light, and you have a production of unforgettable visual as well as verbal impact. How anaemic Dysart’s cautious, “utterly worshipless” world is in comparison – something Dysart himself appreciates. He is a modern everyman not even in search of a soul: shallower, less noble and certainly less passionate than Strang, yet also, perhaps, milder and kinder. Is this progress?
Any production of Equus stands or falls on the actors playing Strang and Dysart, but also on whether it evokes a real sense of mystery and terror, and the director, Thea Sharrock succeeds in this most difficult trick, too. Somewhere between Strang’s imagination, Dysart’s growing fascination with it, the stark details of the boy’s crime and the six monumental horses’ heads looming out of the darkness, we see what Strang might see in Equus: no God in human form saying “Be ye comforted”, but an animal-headed deity like those of the ancient Egyptians or Mayans, terrifyingly alien, terrifyingly beyond our ideas of good and evil.
The neatness of Shaffer’s resolution, with Strang too easily restored to “normality”, while Dysart takes over his neuroses or insights, has always been one of the play’s faults. But Dysart’s self-portrait of himself as an Aztec high priest, cutting out the hearts and entrails of children to make them fit for our equable world, is an image that stays powerfully with you. There will be no neat resolution for him, and none for us, either. Rarely does contemporary drama probe so deep. In this fine production, it adds up to AN ELECTRIFYING EVENING OF THEATRE.
Christopher Hart
VIEW 2008
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