[Equus debuted 26 July 1973 in a National Theatre production directed by John Dexter at London's Old Vic Theatre. In the following mixed review of the premiere, Wardle finds the play rather calculated and forced.]

Peter Shaffer is a writer of formidable intelligence and traditional stage technique whose consistent purpose has been to invoke the primal dramatic forces which would blow his own equipment sky high. In style one can never predict what kind of piece he will write next but his theme remains constant. Whether he is opposing Christian and Aztec culture in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, or a philosopher and an anarchist poet in The Battle of Shrivings Shaffer is repeatedly mounting a tournament between Apollo and Dionysus under various coats of arms.

The argument of these plays is lacking in sinew; but the really sad thing about them is that while they are intended to celebrate the dark gods, it is always Apollo who wins. Mr Shaffer, a Western intellectual, was born into his service: and when he tries to conjure up Dionysus all he can offer is a projection governed by the Apollonian rules of reason and control.

Equus, although a far better work than Shrivings, repeats the same inescapable pattern. It is based on the case of a stable boy, aged 17, who unaccountably put out the eyes of six horses with an iron spike. Why? Mr Shaffer attempts an answer through the authoritarian medium of the institutional psychiatric interview.

Characteristically, the interviewer is the modern equivalent of a spoiled priest, much afflicted by Laingian doubts: but however equal the terms on which they agree to meet (playing a game of mutual interrogation in the early scenes), the fact remains that Dr. Dysart is in charge and can at any minute terminate the session and dispatch Alan back to his solitary nightmares.

Within this framework, taking in discussions with the parents and flashback reenactments with the boy, the play starts unravelling the enigmatic atrocity. Son of a pious mother and atheist father, Alan developed an early obsession with Christian sado-masochism, while a wild ride on the sea coast gave him a parallel fixation on horses. The two obsessions merge in his private cult of "Equus", and on taking a weekend stable job, he consummates his worship in orgiastic night riding. But when a girl takes him back to the stable to make love, he sees this as an act of sacrilege; and, believing that the eyes of Equus will reduce him to permanent impotence, he blinds every horse in the stable.

Clearly the play's main concern is neither with the doctor nor the patient, but with the god-like image of Equus. One senses Mr Shaffer straining to the limit to summon this awful presence. But, not for the first time, he owes whatever numinous results he does achieve to his director, John Dexter.

As with the unearthly masks in The Royal Hunt, so with the horses in this play. They are played by standing actors wearing hoof-lifts and wired silver heads through which the performers' own faces remain visible. The effect is totally stylized (while also fitting in with the centaur imagery), but it secures in full the magical transformation which is the special province of the mask. In the night ride on a manhandled revolve, and in the climactic blinding, with silvery muzzles converging questioningly from the shadows of the stable, the play instantly fills the theatre with the sense of a potent and ancient force returning to life.

The text, however, does no such thing. The image of the horse is poetically inexhaustible, and Mr Shaffer draws on its ambiguity (dominion and servitude) to link his pagan and Christian material. But here, as in the surrounding detail, what comes through is not a fiery symbol, but the sense of a painstaking and profoundly dissatisfied intelligence carefully slotting things together. Alan, with his war-horse battle cries against consumer goods, is no less a schematic automaton than his clockwork parents, both wound up to produce a prearranged clinical condition and to deliver lines like: "I can't imagine, Doctor, it's unbelievable. He loves animals."

There is very little real dialogue. Even the interviews consist of solo turns introduced with wary parleys on both sides. Peter Firth, a newcomer to the National, brings tremendous nervous energy and lyricism to the part of the boy; the ecstatic tenderness of his stable scenes certainly adds life to the play's calculations. But where Mr Shaffer can take most credit is in the part of the Doctor, played on a knife edge of professional skill and personal disgust by Alec McCowen, who threads his way through the character's confessions (a lover of ancient Greece who is virtually impotent himself) with fully justified trust in the excellence of the writing.