Peter Shaffer's fantastical play Equus is notorious for needling its way into the messy complexities of adolescent sexuality, showing how religion, repression and fury lead a 17-year-old boy to violently blind six horses. So it's apt that Lindsey Posner's striking staging feels as intimate as trespassing into a teenager's bedroom. The lights are dim, and bare-chested dancers are the only furniture. Soon, the Menier's small stage seems to swell, its walls struggling to contain the vastness of this young man's terrifying internal world.
Queer Themes and Intimate Moments
There's always been a latent homoeroticism to Shaffer's play but Posner drags this story's queer themes right out to the surface. Alan Strang (an appropriately sullen, unreadable Noah Valentine) is a misunderstood, lonely boy who escapes his television-hating socialist father Frank (Colin Mace) and his doting religious mother Dora (Emma Cunniffe) by mucking out riding stables at weekends. When he thinks no one's looking, he finds a kind of twisted spiritual communion in embracing the horses. Posner gives us tender scenes of Valentine nuzzling prized stallion Nugget (Ed Mitchell) – in the half-light, they just seem like two boys, rubbing heads, and finding secret comfort in each other's company. Of course, things soon start to get a bit less wholesome, and Alan winds up in youth psychiatric hospital, where seasoned Dr Martin Dysart (Toby Stephens) is tasked with venturing into his tortured internal landscape.
Post-Freudian Themes and Modern Sensibilities
Shaffer was writing in the post-Freudian 1970s, when there was a passionate interest in exposing and exploring all the ancient carnal urges that previous decades had tried to erase from polite society. Arguably, it was an overcorrection. Today, there's something mildly uncomfortable – silly even – about Dysart's obsessive, mythic quest to pin down the exact details of the teenage Alan's sexual struggles and humiliations. But Posner's production wears these themes lightly, letting Shaffer's deft plotting and gently satirical humour shine out.
Here, Stephens has the energy of a weary detective solving one last case as he hunts down the reasons for Strang's bizarre crime. Posner downplays Shaffer's Classical resonances by removing the masks the horses usually wear, and paring back Dysart's Dionysian energy – his trips to Greece seem nothing more than the eccentricities of an overworked medic. His unsettling dreams about carving up children are punctured by frank, gently funny conversations with his friend Hesther (Amanda Abbington), who won't let him slip into a narrative of mythic sacrifice.
Intense Physicality and Emotional Loss
Instead of the usual equine pageantry, the play's climatic scenes have the intense bodily energy of an ecstatic rave in a damp field. James Cousins' brilliant movement direction is as vivid as a 4am hallucination, making six mud-smeared bodies tumble into one charging horse then fall apart, exhausted. This is the kind of heightened sensation that Alan can't find in his dull everyday existence, split between a mundane shop job and a closely surveilled home life. And when Dysart is forced to tear down Alan's intricately constructed fantasy life, it feels like a real loss – or even a kind of conversion therapy. His delusions might be fatal, but they're more potent than anything the real world can supply.
Equus is at the Menier Chocolate Factory until 4 July.
