Equus

Equus
September 5, 2008
8:00 PM
Orch F 112

I've wanted to see Equus since I read it in college, and I will admit that when I found out Daniel Radcliffe was going to be in it, I was kind of pissed off. I didn't have anything against him, but I knew that some people would be going to see Harry Potter nekkid and the production ran the risk of turning into a meat market. Or, worse, fans shrieking at inappropriate moments would ruin the play. None of that happened at this first preview. In a packed house, there wasn't a peep of entrance applause.*

Richard Griffiths** and Mr. Radcliffe reprise their roles as the psychotherapist and troubled boy he is treating for brutally blinding six horses. After playing together in Harry Potter (Mr. Griffiths is the vituperative Uncle Vernon) and in this production in London, our two leads have an easy vibe with each other. God knows they need it. Equus is a difficult play and I imagine it's been butchered more often than it's succeeded. This production is a success. It's creepy, sometimes scary, and intense, but more than all that, it sweeps you up in the slow pulling of facts from the traumatized, nightmare-ridden boy to piece together what happened and why. The result is uncomfortable; the performances from the leads are understated and without inhibition—qualities that seem to contradict but are key to the play working, especially in Mr. Radcliffe's role.

The boy isn't the interesting thing in Equus. It's the people around him: his parents whose conflicting views—the mother ultra-religious, the father an atheist—have conflated to instill in their son a desire to worship horses instead of the conventional God; it's the therapist who is so good at treating children's neuroses that he dreams of tearing out their insides because he knows that this is what he is essentially doing and envies their fantasies as compared to his dull life; it's the magistrate who sees hope for the boy in the soulless treatment he'll be given; this is what intrigues far more than a boy with a fantasy.

The final scene in which Mr. Radcliffe recreates the violent act that got him put into care is explosive and harrowing; he runs up walls, throws himself against them, screaming as the horses surround him, stamping and closing in, smoke billowing, until Mr. Griffiths captures him with a blanket and holds him as he shakes until finally he can be lowered to his bed. Then the final monologue—the psychotherapist irrevocably changed by this boy, feeling the trap of his profession, and the masks of the horses hovering above him, knowing that his life will go on and on and on unchanged, without risk, following the mores of society, training his patients to do the same, and turning them all into horses—brilliant, strong creatures who do as they are told despite having the ability to trample the humans who control them, and becoming one himself.



*Interestingly, this article from 2007 mentions the London incarnation of this production as an example of how entrance applause is harder to come by in London.

**Mr. Griffiths is notorious for stopping shows to lecture audience members who let their phones go off (leaving much of the History Boys audience quaking), so before the show and at intermission in addition to the recorded announcement, ushers went up the aisle row by row and made the announcement again and again. I've been to this theater many times and never had this happen before, so I can only guess that Mr. Griffiths' reputation precedes him.