Theatre review: Equus

Published on Thursday 4 March 2010 18:03

EQUUS **** DUNDEE REP

FIRST seen at the National Theatre in London in 1973, Peter Shaffer's Equus is a brilliant play of its time, that still shudders and resonates today. Its central character – the middle-aged psychiatrist-narrator Martin Dysart – is a man on the cusp of change, a living symbol of that 1970s' moment when the idea of a sleek, rational, liberating, onward-and-upward modernity began to lose its resonance, and to be replaced with fear that in their long post-war surge away from faith and tradition, western societies were beginning to lose more than they had gained.

Dysart's growing unease is famously crystallised in his encounter with Alan Strang, a disturbed teenage boy who has savagely blinded four horses at the stables where he works, and who proves – under therapy – to have had a relationship with them that carried him to heights of passion, worship and erotic ecstasy Dysart himself has never known.

The paradox of Jemima Levick's new production at Dundee Rep is that it seems to make many mistakes in approaching this monumental text, yet still, in the end, achieves unforgettable levels of power. The decision to stage the play in the round, in a transformed Dundee auditorium made to look like a banal modern meeting-room, makes very little obvious sense; its visual and movement elements are more constrained than on an open stage, and their symbolic and transforming power more difficult to grasp. The advertised decision to update the play seems to have been wisely abandoned in mid-production; and Robert Paterson's Dysart consistently does a little too much, in a tearfully demonstrative performance, rather than let Shaffer's text speak for itself.

Yet with the whole ensemble on stage together, the show gradually gathers an intensity in performance that is both moving and disturbing. Duncan Anderson is a tremendous Alan Strang, frightening, forceful, vulnerable, lost. John Buick and Ann Louise Ross are in tremendous form as his parents.

In the end, this Equus emerges as a tremendous tribute to the power of a great company of actors, working together to illuminate an important text, even from a slightly awkward angle. And everyone who has played a role, over the last decade, in freeing and supporting the actors of the Rep ensemble to achieve this level of work, can take great pride in that achievement.