The Stage

Equus

Published Monday 12 September 2011 at 10:45 by Laura Fraine

The silence in the auditorium following Act I’s dramatic climax is broken by one audience member - “Wow… wow…”. Michael Cabot’s Equus is a production that takes you with it.

Matthew Pattimore (Alan Strang) and Aidan Downing (Nugget) in Equus at Gala Theatre, Durham Photo: Sheila Burnett

From a horrific premise - a 17-year-old boy is in a psychiatric unit after blinding horses with a metal spike - Peter Shaffer’s 1973 play seeks the answers behind such seemingly senseless behaviour. Judgement and disgust are left at the door. Matthew Pattimore’s Alan Strang is taut, flawless and so compelling as to make his sexual attraction to horses a truly erotic experience. Malcolm James takes the role of his psychiatrist and our interpreter, Martin Dysart, a doctor quietly losing faith in his own treatment. Dysart gets the best lines in this piece, contrasting his patient’s extreme blend of passionate worship with his own sterile and cowed existence, and James easily makes the production half his own. Is a life eradicated of fervour worth living? This is the play’s ultimate question, although considering the alternative - a violently disturbed child and his helpless victims - I couldn’t quite make the leap.

Some characters are less fully drawn. Frank (Steve Dineen) and Dora Strang (Anna Kirke), Alan’s parents, are both powerful in their own right, but so diametrically opposed it is hard to imagine how they ever made a couple at all. Hesther Salomon, efficiently played by Carole Dance, seems to be yearning for a greater depth to her written character.

But the horses are fantastic. The wire masks designed by Kerry Bradley seem to take on a life of their own. In particular, Aidan Downing cuts a balletic, poetic figure as Nugget, the lead horse.