This shocking West End play is like Netflix’s Adolescence but live
Equus play review and star rating: ★★★★
If a psychological drama about a teenager with an erotic fixation on horses sounds controversial, imagine how the idea landed 53 years ago. Peter Shaffer’s Equus is still platforming taboo-breaking conversations around mental health 53 years after its world premiere, which is probably more a criticism of our mental health provisions than it is a celebration of Shaffer’s play – but health service grumbles aside, Equus is a compelling text with an astonishing contemporaneity.
It has commanded headlines because it features two shocking scenes in which the teenager, Alan Strang, strips naked and cavorts on the backs of horses, choosing to ride flesh-to-hide to feel an intimacy with the animals. Just to make that a bit more tabloidy, Daniel Radcliffe – at the time still filming Harry Potter – played the lead role in a West End revival in 2007. But Equus also offers the macro perspective: zoomed out, it is a nuanced perspective of trauma and isolation by way of one troubled teen.
Equus: play retains its contemporaneity
Now it feels fresh for a whole other reason. The rise of the Manosphere and conversations around male anger, particularly in young men, with the rise of social media silos, has pervaded the news cycle. A very good Louis Theroux documentary platformed some of the shocking behaviour patterns that in some online and male circles have become commonplace, such as targeted physical attacks on men in public that are live streamed to thousands for entertainment. Strang – who is a 17-year-old boy filled with anger that spills out like some foreign, alien force that inhabits him from within – on modern evaluation feels like a creepy prelude to Theroux’s modern case studies.
Noah Valentine, the 23-year-old formerly of BBC drama Waterloo Road, is an enticing pile of nerves as Strang, a chilling convergence of tensed muscles and a ferocious belt. He’s sent to a psychological rehabilitation facility to meet Dr. Martin Dysart, who faces as many emotional challenges as Strang. It’s an epically meaty role for former Bond actor and West End stalwart Toby Stephens, whose brilliant, scruffy academic type has added masculine brawn.
Half of Equus, the taut two-handed part, is essentially two men standing in battle, attempting to unearth each other’s deepest desires, while the other part involves a pack of six horses. Director Lindsay Posner clearly spent days angling these two men in a particular way as they stand and bite at one another, to enhance the sense of combat.
Movement director James Cousins has these animals, each played by a dancer, ogling the audience from the back of the stage. It’s an amazing choreographed feat, especially when they come together to form one massive, gentle beast.
Equus is just a very strong idea that doesn’t need a reinvention of the wheel to be staged again brilliantly, although this production is particularly fine.
Equus plays at the Menier Chocolate Factory until 4 July