[In the review below, Kalson contends that the character of Dysart, who "embodies the central conflict which affords the play its universality, " is insufficiently developed, leaving the doctor's dilemma overshadowed by the psychological "case history."]

Britain's National Theatre has restored passion to the theatre with what well may be the most controversial production of its first decade—Peter Shaffer's Equus. The play marks an auspicious return to the theatre after a three-year hiatus during which the author of Five Finger Exercise, The Royal Hunt of the Sun, and Black Comedy was frequently referred to as the brother of the author of Sleuth.

The new work, concerning the rehabilitation by a psychiatrist of a disturbed stable lad who has blinded six horses, may seem at first a new direction for Shaffer; yet it shares affinities with his earlier plays. Like Five Finger Exercise, a youth's total dependence on an older man forces the seemingly stronger to examine the motives of his own actions; like Royal Hunt, man creates God in order to enslave him.

Young Alan Strang, seeking someone or something to worship, has entered into an exhilarating relationship, obviously sexual, with a horse he rides at night, a horse who becomes the boy's personal god-slave. His socialist father, an avowed atheist, had forbidden him to keep a picture of a bound and beaten Christ at the foot of his bed, and Alan had replaced it with an hypnotic head-on picture of a horse with staring eyes. Years before he had had one thrilling ride on a horse along the beach, but his father had pulled him from the horse, throwing him to the ground. The intensity of his present relationship with the animal makes him impotent with a girl in the stable while several horses stand nearby. Ashamed and terrified that the horse has witnessed his attempt at what appears to Alan an act of betrayal against his god and his slave, the boy commits the horrible crime of putting out the eyes of all the horses.

The core of the play, however, is not the retelling of this sensational case history. Instead the play examines the relationship in which, subtly, the doctor replaces the horse as the god-slave that the boy creates. But the cure requires the death of the boy's worshipful passion for Equus. The doctor, Martin Dysart, coldly surrounds himself with books on ancient Greece and looks at pictures of centaurs while the boy is himself wildly becoming a centaur in a Hampshire field and reliving the myths which the doctor can only read about. The doctor questions his right to return the boy to a so-called state of normalcy for he comes to envy the passion of which his own life is totally void. By doing what is expected of him as psychiatrist, Dysart symbolically feels the horse's bit clamping his own mouth, and he sees himself picking at children's heads, just as Alan had stabbed the horses' heads.

The question raised by Anthony Burgess in his novels A Clockwork Orange and Enderby—Has society the right to tamper with what is unique about an individual and remold him into what passes for an acceptable member of the group?—is well dramatized by Shaffer, but perhaps the play's one failing is that the development of the character of the psychiatrist, the character who embodies the central conflict which affords the play its universality, cannot be drawn as vividly as the incidents which lead to the confrontation of doctor and patient. The play's disproportion may be in part a result of the staging by John Dexter, who sets the play in a surgical amphitheatre by seating sixty members of the audience in three steep tiers of seats at the back of a bare stage, thus providing a logical and forcefully symbolic background as Dysart tells the story in which he "murders to dissect." The bare stage nonetheless allows Dexter some moments of directorial over-indulgence as he fluidly stages the scenes on the beach, in the fields, in the stable, the latter scene with performers as bare as the stage itself. The horses are cleverly impersonated by clothed actors who don metal horses' heads through which their own heads can be seen. Dexter has even ingeniously solved the problem of staging a wild ride by the use of a platform which is spun by the actor-horses. The production's imbalance, which centers most of one's attention on the case-history aspects of the piece, is nearly overcome by Alec McCowen's eloquent agony as the troubled doctor. McCowen is magnificently supported by Peter Firth, a young actor whose development will obviously be worth watching.

Equus' imbalance is serious enough to lead some to question if the undoubted passion of the electrifying production has not been misspent. Equus does not immediately force its audience to face such overwhelming current problems as political kidnapping and genocide, the subjects of Christopher Hampton's widely acclaimed Savages. But perhaps Shaffer's theme is itself finally his play's best defense. Equus provides the one evening of passion that is currently available to London theatregoers trapped by the late-summer doldrums of the waning season.

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