PETER Shaffer’s “Equus” is a mystery play of sorts, but it’s less a whodunit than a whywasitdun.
The story of a disturbed young man who steals into a stable one night and blinds six horses – and the child psychiatrist who tries to find out why – opened in London in 1973. From there it went on to star a whole galaxy of stars on stage and screen: Anthony Hopkins, Richard Burton and a young Peter Firth among them.
But there’s no mystery behind the revival that opened last night: It’s brought Harry Potter and Uncle Vernon – that is, Daniel Radcliffe and Richard Griffiths – to Broadway.
And with the new cast, the star balance has shifted, from that of the psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Dysart, to Radcliffe’s tortured Alan Strang. Or, as far as most people are concerned, to Harry Potter doing the full monty.
Despite his almost total lack of stage experience – seven years of Potter in his magic kingdom suggest Shirley Temple rather than Laurence Olivier – Radcliffe, with his luminously intense eyes and fragile but wiry body, looks wonderfully right as Alan, the 17-year-old British boy besotted by everything equine.
His acting, beautifully understated and withdrawn, has just the right manner for this horribly mixed-up adolescent, at the prey of a wayward religiosity and a twisted sexuality cemented together with suburban hypocrisy.
As Alan’s psychiatrist eventually realizes, his is a madness capable of the fires of ecstasy.
Griffiths – best known as the gay, liberal and garrulous old schoolmaster in “The History Boys” – shapes the role in a far less buttoned-up fashion than his predecessors.
To some extent, it works: Perhaps a more disheveled and less formal psychiatrist would appeal to a contemporary adolescent more than the authoritarian, almost haughty figure suggested by the likes of Hopkins and Burton.
Yet something’s missing now in the strength of contrast between the rebellious boy and the old psychiatrist, who dreams of ancient Greece.
This is possibly a reading embedded in Thea Sharrock’s direction, which in many respects lacks the power that flowed through John Dexter’s original staging. Moreover, the rest of the cast – with the exception of Anna Camp, as a young woman trying to initiate Alan into the mystique of sex – seems less secure this second time around.
The unhappily married Dysart finds himself envying the intense psychic reality felt by Alan, who worships horses and finds sexual release atop a steed.
Dysart can cure him, but in that cure rests the seeds of mediocrity.
Would a psychiatrist feel like this today? Then again, would a playwright?