Peter Shaffer's Equus [is] a play about the creation of a Dionysian religion in a highly rational world, a passionate worship that also reflects the Christian world's inability to integrate sexuality and religion. Equus is one of a number of plays by major contemporary playwrights that deal with the place of religion in a seemingly godless world. (p. 418)

Peter Shaffer has been, in his major work,… fascinated with the impulse toward faith. For him the adversary of the man of faith is not a cosmic void or universal chaos; it is rationality. For Shaffer, it is the cold, clinical, empirical man without faith who has created an orderly, materialistic world that has robbed man of those irrational qualities that can make life an intense experience. Shaffer is not as concerned with the eternal design as he is with the individual who has become a diminished thing. In his play, The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Shaffer pitted an historic conqueror of the New World, able to sail across uncharted seas, scale the loftiest mountains, and reduce a wealthy, glorious Inca culture to slavery, against an Inca prince who passionately, if irrationally, believes he is born of the gods of the sun. (p. 427)

What fascinated Shaffer in The Royal Hunt of the Sun is the sense that the dark Christian world offers man no joy, no ecstasy—that perhaps there are more fulfilling faiths. Again, Shaffer is not concerned with existence of a god: he is fascinated with man's need for religion, for transcendence, for passionate submission. Athahuallpa [the Inca prince] has a real, living faith. It does not matter that he is not, as he believes, immortal. It only matters that the faith sustains him throughout his life and makes his death bearable. Pizarro hoped he could worship a god. Ultimately he came to love a son, feel grief for a fellow mortal. Through that feeling, Pizarro's life was, for a few moments, affirmed.

At the center of all the spectacle that entranced one in The Royal Hunt in the Sun was the clash of ideas between two men; one middle aged and despairing, the other young and filled with faith. That same clash is at the core of Equus, but we are no longer in as overtly Christian a society. If Pizarro was the soldier servant of the Holy Catholic Church, killing and conquering so that Christ's kingdom could triumph on earth, Martin Dysart is the conqueror of the new religion of psychiatry, conquering minds in the name of normality and social efficiency. Dysart's nemesis is not the young son of the sun, king of his rich land, but a teenage boy who has created in his mind his own kingdom of god; a boy who has, in the middle of sterile, efficient contemporary society, created and lived a primal, passionate religion replete with ceremonies and sacrifices and total ecstasy.

Equus begins as something of a mystery story, "Why did the boy blind six horses with a metal spike?" but it becomes the clash between Dionysian passion and fluorescent comfort. (pp. 428-29)

Clearly Alan Strang is abnormal in a clinical sense. The job of a psychiatrist is to restore him, or bring him, to a normal state. But what does it mean to be normal? Our psychiatrist is not sure: "The Normal is the good smile in a child's eyes—all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills—like a God. It is the ordinary made beautiful: it is also the Average made lethal."… The exorcism necessary to make Alan Strang normal is the destruction of the religion which is the core of his life…. (p. 430)

Alan Strange will be cured. He will be sent back into the normal world. His worship of the horse-god will be exchanged for interest in a motorbike. He will no longer be impotent, but he will have lost the passion Dr. Martin Dysart so longs for.

Equus builds on the strange story of Alan Strang, but Dr. Martin Dysart is Shaffer's central character…. Dysart feels want that cannot be answered by the tangible things of this world. He is successful at his job, but he has gnawing doubts about the meaning of the normalcy for which he is molding people. He has a marriage and the money to live well and travel, but the marriage is now habit and the things do not satisfy. Dysart is missing the sense of transcendence that can come from a real worship. Speaking of himself as someone apart, he says: "What worship has he ever known? Real worship! Without worship you shrink, it's as brutal as that…. I shrank my own life."… What makes Dysart sense a diminution is his awareness that something very basic has been lost in our technological, pragmatic society, something intangible which must be regained if he is to live meaningfully: "I need—more desperately than my children need me—a way of seeing in the dark. What way is this?… What dark is this?… I cannot call it ordained of God: I can't get that far. I will however pay it so much homage."… (p. 431)

Shaffer gives us the temple of man's faith in scientific explanations and miracles but shows that there are basic needs of man that can never be met by efficiency. (p. 432)