Domestication and its discontents.

Ellenzweig, Allen

Equus

by Peter Shaffer

Directed by Thea Sharrock

The Shubert Theatre, New York

THE IDEA that madness brings you closer to God and to the creative spirit seems a holdover from the 1970's, arguably our last "romantic" era. Today, the idea and the era are both quite dead. I'm reminded of this fact by the current revival of Peter Shaffer's Equus, which pits Apollonian and Dionysian forces against each other in the persons of Martin Dysart, a hospital psychiatrist weary of life's rational compromises, and Alan Strang, a teenage miscreant who has been sent for analysis after committing a grotesque act of rage and passion. Alan has, on one mad night, speared six horses blind in a stable near his home.

Equus was an enormous hit in London and on Broadway in the mid-1970's (starring Anthony Hopkins and Peter Firth in New York). The current revival maintains its two recent London leads: Richard Griffith, who played the eccentrically charming and superbly rotund pedagogue at the center of The History Boys a few years ago, now in the role of Dysart; and Daniel Radcliffe--yes, Harry Potter himself--as the confused teenager with an equine fixation and anger management issues. Unless you've been living under a rock, you will have heard that young Radcliffe plays a culminating scene in the nude, venturing into more obviously adult territory than the Potter franchise ever allowed.

Dysart is a provincial psychiatrist prevailed upon by a local magistrate, played by Kate Mulgrew, to unearth the mysteries of the hideous crime against six glorious and powerful steeds, played by lithe young men in form-fitting gear with sculpted metal armatures for horse heads and hooves, choreographed to move in equine fashion. She assures him that he's the only one of his colleagues capable of untangling this mess with suitable sympathy for the defendant, a tortured soul that the locals would just as soon see hang. Now under psychiatric care, the boy presents an angry yet withholding facade, singing commercial ditties as one keeping secrets too terrible to name or describe. As the story is about deep psychological conflicts, the Freudian grounding of the play requires that we be introduced to the boy's parents, Frank and Dora Strang, who often seem like embodiments of the playwright's thematic ideas rather than like real people.

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Indeed, this symbolism is among the play's crucial problems. Just as Dysart signifies a desiccated bourgeois order and Alan the inchoate forces of anarchic but creative passion, the parents present similarly neat counterpoints. The father, an atheist, is a man of strict discipline, while the mother, a committed Christian, offers a modicum of maternal warmth. Neither seems attuned to the son's sexual awakenings, and both are slow to reveal their knowledge of the boy's obsession with horses, with its elements of religious fervor and homoerotic fixation. The years since its 1973 opening have dimmed the theatrical shock that attended the original production, but the compact Radcliffe, tenderly embracing and stroking the horses/men and mounting his favored steed for a fevered midnight ride, imbues these moments with the necessary erotic charge. However, this is not the direction in which Shaffer takes Alan's sexual interests as the play unfolds, and one can't help wonder if the playwright lacked the courage to travel that road.

The Strang parents, in any case, function largely as symbolic locations in Shaffer's cosmology: religion and the emotional power of worship are good (Mother and son Alan); cool rationalism without the fervor of faith is bad (Father and Dysart). This may have been Shaffer's epiphany in the 1970's, but in the decades since, following the rise of the Christian right and Islamic fundamentalism, a great many of us might prefer a dispassionate agnosticism or atheism over religious zeal. Dr. Dysart is more complex but also part of a rather schematized drama, as we find him elaborating his two-sided conundrum in a direct address to the audience: if I'm so logical a healer of troubled spirits, why is my little life so circumscribed and miserable; why can't I be more like this mad boy with his unchained worshipful passion?

If Richard Griffith sometimes seems to be tossing off his role, his counterpart is working overtime, and to good effect: Daniel Radcliffe may not have the full complement of menace and feral energy called for at the play's start, but he brings a convincing sense of the wounded and the vulnerable to Alan Strang, and the sort of confused, misdirected anger that has him toy with the therapist's questions and delight in telling a well-meaning nurse to "Fuck off!"

Equus is a period piece from an era when youthful sexual energies joined with the quest for spirituality in a romantic attempt to remake the world into a new Eden. That a middle-aged psychiatrist might find a boy's tortured confection of sexual guilt and religious ecstasy a test of his own passion and ardor for life is not unbelievable. What strains credibility is the way in which Dysart's plodding heroism emerges in the play's final dramatic moment: a revelatory breakthrough at a single therapy session. If only self-revelation were that easy.