[In thex following review, Davies praises the staging and performances of the London production of Equus, but he contends that Shaffer compromised his investigation of "our right to tamper with our fellow-beings in the cause of 'normality ' " by focusing on "a bunch of people already far gone in abnormality. "]

Peter Shaffer's new work was greeted with hoots of approval by the first-nighters at the National Theatre, and indeed Equus offered much to applaud. A fine central performance by young Peter Firth as the adolescent psycho-patient for whom the horse is the sole fount of passion and focus of worship, was matched by the resourceful daring of author, director and designer in disguising a troupe of young men as two-legged horses. These Mark II centaurs, with beautifully wrought horseheads of shining chrome tubing strapped to their skulls, and matching metalmesh hooves lashed to their feet in such a way that the human heels stuck out like fetlocks, magnificently brought off the illusion of an animal presence. The bathos of pantomime horseplay never threatened. Mere flicks of the head and flexings of the knee suggested the impatient power of the beasts; and the equine exhalation, half shiver, half snort, that issued from the principal horse centre-stage, as the light died on the first half of the play, was thrillingly done.

Visually, then, John Dexter's production was fine; but the argument of the play was worrying. There is a good deal of argument in Equus, for its narrator/chorus, the psychiatrist Dysart, played by Alec McCowen, has a lot of explaining to do. Why did his horsestruck young patient, liberated from an electrical goods shop and working in a stable, suddenly round on the objects of his veneration at dead of night and hideously put out their eyes with a metal spike? What has it got to do with his God-fearing mother, his heavy-footed atheist-socialist Dad? As Dysart gradually works his way past the resentment of his patient, their taut confrontations flare up into dramatic recreations of the lad's formative crises; and these in turn work remorselessly towards the first re-enactment of the grisly, gouging crime.

It's an uncomfortably shaped evening for Dysart. He must hover between the roles of Freudian sleuth and theatrical ringmaster, now goading the boy into further self-revelation, now receiving muted deputations from the anxious parents, now turning to issue a progress report to his on-stage assistants and the audience. And in between times he flogs out of himself a full admission of his own miseries: a dead marriage, low sperm-count, loss of the power to worship, his twee annual pilgrimage to 'primitive' Greece ('sponge bag crammed with Entero-Vioform'), the cold professional smoothness of his days followed at night by violent dreams of ritual human sacrifice. By the time his case is solved, Dysart is wringing his hands at the prospect of applying treatment, for in curing Alan, as he will, he must wipe away from the boy's consciousness all its enviable excesses, all the traces of his unique and irreplaceable passion, making him fit for nothing better than flogging flashlamps again. Thus Dysart arrives, in his breast-beating way, at distinctly Szasz-like conclusions about the nature of mental disturbance, despairingly questioning our right to tamper with our fellow-beings in the cause of 'normality'. The pity is that in constructing a position from which to launch its missiles of doubt, the play must base itself on a bunch of people already far gone in abnormality. Important questions are begged from the start.

Alec McCowen's performance is a noble attempt to make a coherent whole out of a mass of exposition; but vocally he does make things extra-arduous for himself. He herringbones up through some of Mr Shaffer's grittier sentences like a mountaineer speaking in time to the plod of his ill-fitting snow-shoes, flopping back with weary exhaustion on the summit of the final word. Then he returns to the foot of the slope and does it again, always careful, occasionally prim.

Peter Firth is admirable as Alan, whether shrieking with ecstasy during his midnight ride or quaking at the torturing imminence of sexual initiation in his holy of holies, the stable. Clothes are torn off for this climactic seduction scene, and Alan is left naked to face his humiliating failure. Luckily, Mr Firth is a lean, white-fleshed young man upon whose surface muscle and sinew are delineated as in a drawing by Blake; his body sinks impressively from pride to wretchedness. His seductress is played by Doran Godwin, whose flounced and beribboned performance as Jane Austen's Emma has just run its course of TV repeats. Here she appears in a woolly jumper and wellies, yet she brings a little of Emma's challenging archness with her. Possibly this manner is her forte; it has worked very well, at any rate, in both contexts. But perhaps she should be careful not to stick like that, as scolding mothers used to say.