'Equus' review — this deeply impassioned revival of Peter Shaffer's play is a wild ride

Read our review of Equus, starring Toby Stephens and Noah Valentine, now in performances at the Menier Chocolate Factory to 4 July.

Summary

• Peter Shaffer's Equus is revived at the Menier Chocolate Factory
• It's based on a real-life story of a teenage boy blinding horses
• Toby Stephens and Noah Valentine are a brilliant double act
• Lindsay Posner's production features astonishing athleticism

Peter Shaffer was born nearly 100 years ago to the day of the opening of this revival of his play Equus. So the first thing to be said about Lindsay Posner’s deeply impassioned production is that it honours the legacy of a British playwright unrivalled in the sheer theatricality of his imagination.

Some may point to changing fashions in psychiatric practice in the half-century since Shaffer’s 1973 psychodrama first premiered at the Old Vic. John Dexter’s landmark production later transferred to Broadway where I saw it as a theatre-keen teenager: Richard Burton’s starring performance – a dry run for his Oscar-nominated star turn in the 1977 film version - lives with me to this day.

I’ve seen every iteration of Equus since then in both New York and London, some better than others. This version upholds the tradition begun with Peter Firth onstage and then screen in catapulting to attention the young man cast as Alan Strang, the ravaged teenager who blinds six horses with a metal spike – a variation on a real-life incident from which Shaffer spun a play that, as was the wont of the author of Amadeus, placed two people of differing temperaments in powerful opposition to one another.

As played here by newcomer Noah Valentine, Alan exists at the troubled and troubling core of a play that finds his self-doubting psychiatrist, Martin Dysart (the Burton role now taken by Toby Stephens), envying a depth of feeling that this man of medicine has never known. “At least he has galloped, when did you?” says Dysart of the angry adolescent in his care, to paraphrase the implicit rebuke from Alan that Dysart feels at every turn.

The essentially bare space of Paul Farnsworth’s set nods towards John Napier’s stripped-back original design: here, too, the cast are onlookers to the action and sit among the stalls, stepping into the playing arena as required. Paul Pyant’s majestic lighting all but renders palpable the dangerous recesses of the mind, and Adam Cork’s sound design thrums ominously, only to reach fever pitch in keeping with the carefully choreographed chaos of the preordained ending.

The play is told in flashback, Stephens’s bearded, bespectacled Dysart recounting a case brought to him by a kindly magistrate, Hesther (an empathic Amanda Abbington). We then meet Valentine’s sullen Alan, a sulky lad whose parents consist of an atheist father and a God-fearing mum who has no doubt that the Devil has entered into her son: Colin Mace and Emma Cunniffe are first-rate in these roles. Newcomer Bella Aubin is immediately engaging as Jill, Alan’s putative partner – until she isn’t.

None of the humans on view matter as much to Alan as the libidinous world he discovers via the chestnut-coloured Nugget (the charismatic Ed Mitchell), alongside five other equine inhabitants of the very stable this lad will soon bring to ruin.

Dispensing here with the metal hooves and headgear of the Napier original, Posner’s production foregrounds six performers of astonishing athleticism. Under the keen eye of James Cousins (Dame Arlene Phillips’s associate on the recent Guys and Dolls), the animals move with unerringly angular grace, the first act culminating in a naked Alan’s victorious ride atop Nugget in a genuine coup de théâtre that sends one in a state of astonishment into the interval.

The second act finds Stephens building to an admirable fury of his own as he further questions whether his patients might not in fact be “victims”, however fully he is committed to toppling Alan from his psychotic perch. There’s a neat synergy in finding this role in the capable hands of the son of the actress, Dame Maggie Smith, for whom Shaffer wrote his much-loved play Lettice and Lovage, which is a comic variant in the study in contrasts on view here. What matters in Equus is the fearless study in extremities that Dysart tells us early on “is the point”: this production, as it must be, is a wild ride.

Equus is at the Menier Chocolate Factory to 4 July. Book Equus tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Equus (Photos by Manuel Harlan)