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| Peter Firth, Everett McGill. |
If one discounts Sleuth,
which is really a comedy-drama, Equus (by
the twin brother of Sleuth’s author)
stands forth as the most successful serious play of the seventies. Originally
staged at Britain’s National Theatre, it came to New York with British actors
Anthony Hopkins and 21-year-old Peter Firth in the leads and consolidated the
former’s star status while making the latter into a rising star.
As directed by John Dexter, Equus emerged as a startlingly original mystery melodrama, with
significant thematic underpinnings. It was staged in a theatrically
enthralling, ritualistic manner that borrowed techniques from the avant-garde
experimenters. The stage was empty of realistic scenery, containing only a
raised, square, non-localized acting space and benches outside the square, and
a curving set of upstage bleachers where a section of the audience could sit
facing downstage. This arrangement—which a number of later shows copied—turned a
Broadway proscenium playhouse into an arena theatre. Actors who were not in a
scene sat waiting quietly on the onstage benches, another commonly repeated
trope.
The horses that are a central component of the action
were played by a half-dozen male actors wearing dark brown jerseys and slacks,
with high metal hooves on their feet and horsehead-shaped wire masks that
barely hid their faces. They moved in expertly staged mimic patterns created by
Claude Chagrin.
Alan Strang (Firth) is a 17-year-old stable boy, son
of a religiously devout mother (Frances Sternhagen) and atheistic printer
father (Michael Higgins). Alan has committed the horrible crime of blinding six
horses with a metal spike. After much prodding by a female magistrate (Marian
Seldes), Dr. Martin Dysart (Hopkins), the overworked chief psychiatrist of a provincial
mental hospital, has agreed to treat Alan and discover what led him to do the
deed.
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| Anthony Hopkins, Peter Firth. |
As the play progresses, layer after layer of the boy’s
warped psyche is bared through the doctor’s various techniques until, finally,
via the use of abreactive therapy, Alan reenacts the events of the fateful
night in the stables. During the doctor’s gradual breaking down of the
alienated boy’s defenses, his own inhibitions, dissatisfactions, and sexual
frustrations are revealed. He comes to feel that his professional duty to cure
the boy is in conflict with his growing belief that Alan’s passion is worth
preserving, and that to make him “normal” in an admittedly “abnormal” world is
to rob him of an authenticity and depth of feeling that he himself has never
known.
The play’s extraordinary power to draw spectators into
the psychiatric quest for answers was enhanced by a magnificent production,
including a much discussed nude scene between Alan and a girl (Roberta Maxwell)
who befriends him in the stables before he reacts guiltily to the presence of
his beloved horses.
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| Roberta Maxwell, Peter Firth. |
The acting of all involved was deemed marvelous. “Anthony
Hopkins, articulate and troubled, is superb. . . . It is a virtuoso
performance, gauged to a fraction,” wrote Clive Barnes. “Peter Firth,” wrote
Walter Kerr, “is wonderfully lithe as he slips snakelike from office to cell,
callow and challenging, devious and yielding all at once.”
Critics hailed Equus’s
magnetically thrilling suspense, its psychological and philosophical
implications, its human compassion, its ritualistic magnification, its
dramaturgic craftsmanship, and its full-bodied language. Kerr called it “one of
the most remarkable examples of stagecraft, as well as of sustained and
multifaceted sensibility, the contemporary theatre has given us.”
There were, however, a few dissidents. The New York Times even published an article
by a psychiatrist attacking the play’s medical and ethical attitudes. John
Simon’s dissenting review summed up most of the negative criticisms. He said he
found Equus “a bundle of anathemas,”
with a nonsensical theme expressed through the unconvincingly drawn character
of Dysart. He disagreed with the viewpoint that curing the boy “diminishes him;
makes him plain, unpoetic and common.” In Simon’s eyes, the author’s handling
of the action was unfair, a “cheap and wrong-headed” swipe at psychiatry, for
Alan could not only gain, not be destroyed, by successful therapy. Simon
criticized the too-pat depiction of the doctor as himself enmeshed in a frigid
life and abnormal lifestyle with his longing for the paganism of ancient
Greece. He attacked the play’s “case history” technique as “the least
imaginative form,” declared the nude scene unnecessary, detected a subtextual
homosexuality whose covert treatment was “particularly jejune,” castigated Alan’s
cure as too simplistic, and dismissed the language as excessively ordinary.
Nonetheless, the play won the Best Play Tony Award, as
well as top awards from the New York Drama Critics Circle, the Outer Critics
Circle, and the Drama Desk. Hopkins picked up awards from the Outer Critics
Circle and Drama Desk. Firth was given the Outer Critics Circle Award for
Notable Performance by a Young Players, and also landed a Tony nomination for
Best Actor. Sternhagen won a Supporting Actress Award from the Drama Desk and
got a Tony nomination in the same category. Dexter won the Best Director Tony,
along with a similar award from the Drama Desk. And Andy Phillips was Tony-nominated
for his lighting.
Anthony Perkins, Tom Hulce, Everett McGill.
Over the course of Equus’s long run, the role of Dysart was played
by Richard Burton, Leonard Nimoy, and Anthony Perkins, while Alan was also
played by Tom Hulce.
