Welcome to Simply Daniel! Here you will find information of all the Daniel Radcliffe's projects! Feel free to navigate through the pages!
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| EQUUS |
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INTRODUCTION After premiering in 1973 in London, Peter Shaffer's Equus ran for more than a thousand performances on Broadway and won the 1974 Tony Award, as well as three other major drama awards. The play focuses on the causes underlying a seemingly senseless act of violence by an adolescent boy, an act that forces the characters to confront questions of responsibility and ultimate meaning. Through his characters, Shaffer explores the dilemmas of late-twentieth-century existence in England and, by extension, in the entire industrialized world. In an increasingly commercial and mechanized culture, there is little place for ecstasy and worship, yet they remain human endowments. Is our trust in science as foolish—even more foolish—than the pagans' belief in their gods? Does being "normal" in such a culture also entail losing one's individuality and learning to live without passion? Equus centers on the explosive encounters between seventeen-year-old Alan Strang, who has blinded six horses with a spike, and Martin Dysart, the middle-aged psychiatrist who agrees to treat him. Shaffer based the plot on an allegedly true story told by a friend about a young man who blinded a stable of horses. Shaffer wrote Equus to "create a mental world in which the deed could be made comprehensible" (p. 9), and the play is structured like a mystery, as Dysart struggles to determine what drove Alan to commit the crime. But Equus is far from a conventional mystery, in which solving the crime relieves tension and restores a stable society. Instead, Dysart's search for the meaning of Alan's act leads him to doubt his own vocation and integrity. The closer he comes to understanding his patient's motives, the more confused Dysart is about how he should respond to Alan and the mental world he has created. The ultimate, insoluble mystery is embodied in the horse-god Equus himself. At the beginning of Act Two , Equus asks Dysart, "Do you really imagine you can account for Me?" (p. 75). The play issues readers and audiences the same challenge. In Equus, the characters, as well as readers and audiences, face a bewildering range of explanations for Alan's mental state. Hesther Salomon, the magistrate who refers Alan to Dysart, sees Alan as a victim in pain and relies on psychiatry to relieve that pain. Alan's parents, Frank and Dora, blame each other to some extent but also acknowledge their inability to comprehend their son and his crime. Dora finally attributes her son's act to "the Devil" (p. 78), and Shaffer does not allow us to dismiss her view lightly. In an eloquent speech to Dysart, Dora attacks the tendency of conventional psychiatry to blame parents for their children's neuroses. She insists that Dysart recognize that "Alan is himself. Every soul is itself. If you added up everything we ever did to him, from his first day on earth to this, you wouldn't find why he did this terrible thing—because that's him; not just all of our things added up" (p. 78). It is this last possibility—that Alan's "illness" is an intrinsic part of his selfhood—that throws Dysart's view of the world into confusion. After his first meeting with Alan, Dysart dreams he is a gold-masked pagan priest cutting the hearts from hundreds of living children in an elaborate ritual. For the rest of the play, Dysart agonizes over questions he has never before considered: By helping the children he sees become "normal," is he actually harming them? Is his allegiance to psychiatry a defense against the passion and spiritual mystery that inform Alan's worship of Equus? Outwardly, Alan is ordinary, even pathetic, in his lack of vocational or social success. He has a boring job in an appliance store and picks up part-time work grooming horses at a local stable. He is painfully uncomfortable with Jill, the girl at the stable who is the only other person his age we see him interact with. Yet Alan creates a fantastic internal world of ecstatic devotion. He builds this world from whatever comes to hand—biblical quotations, bits of Greek mythology, a photograph of a horse his printer father brings home from work, and an emotionally charged seaside horse ride he takes as a child with a stranger. The play insistently raises the question of what horses, and the horse-god Equus in particular, represent to Alan. Alan hears Equus say, " 'I see you.' 'I will save you' " (p. 66), but also hears him laughing after the failed sexual encounter with Jill in the stables. A horse is both "the most naked thing you ever saw" (p. 49) and a ruthless judge of Alan's own vulnerability. After Jill leaves the stable, the terrified Alan pleads for forgiveness from Equus and finally commits his desperate act of cruelty. Equus is Alan's "God-slave," and after he tells Dysart about blinding the horses, Alan cries "KILL ME!...KILL ME!" (pp. 105-6). At the end of the play we are left, like Dysart, to contemplate two unattractive alternatives. One is leaving Alan with his worship, but clearly in intense psychic pain; the other is "curing" Alan at the cost of destroying his passion. Shaffer heightens the audience's role as observers by placing the actors on stage throughout the play. They sit on benches in rows when they are not in a scene. The continuous presence of this audience on stage—an audience that looks much like a jury—makes explicit our own voyeurism and responsibility. The last scene leaves us to ask what Dysart has done and what he should have done. We can accept his assessment that "the Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health, and I am his Priest" (p. 65) or Hesther's insistence that "the boy's in pain.... That's all I see" (p. 83). We may embrace Dora's view of the Devil as "an old-fashioned word, but a true thing" (p. 78). Whatever view we adopt, we are left with Dysart's anguished "What dark is this?" and the question of how to understand his last line: "There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain. And it never comes out" (p. 109). Credit to US PENGUIN GROUP |
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