what dark is this?

A visit to Shaftsbury Avenue this evening, to see Peter Shaffer's Equus, where the seventeen year old boy being diagnosed by a psychologist is played by Daniel (Harry Potter) Radcliffe. The co-star protagonist is Richard Griffiths and the girl with whom Daniel has a fling is played by Joanna Christie. Interestingly, her part was played many years ago by Jenny Agutter, in the film version and Jenny Agutter appears in this version as the magistrate responsible for rescuing the seventeen year old from a prison stretch.

The well-known plot is about the young man Alan Strang, who has blinded six horses with a spike, and Martin Dysart, the middle-aged psychiatrist who agrees to treat him and along the way to discover the reason for the act.

From the beginning, the dialogue is quick and clever and its apparent that another story is unfolding about the paradoxes seen by Dysart whilst he tries to search for meaning in Alan's act and starts to question his own position in life.

Consider Equus as a horse-god and the stables as the temple invented by Alan Strang who experiences a primeval relationship to life, whilst psychiatrist Dysart has an altogether more distant and dysfunctional relationship, muted and unexciting.

There's also a good range of trails to the reason for the situation. Was it brought about by Alan's upbringing? Was he in mental pain? Was there a godly explanation? Was the behaviour simply an intrinsic part of Alan's being?

And Dysart himself isn't without his moments of strangeness. His dreams of pagan and bloody ritual to some extent synthesize the type of behavour seen in his young patient.

The denoument centres around the introduction of a fake truth drug, causing Alan to re-enact the scene at the stables. Its linked with stable girl Jill, who seduces him back to the stables where they get naked in the presence of the horses. To Alan this is like a kind of sacriledge and creates the jagged and callous reaction as he takes out his mixed emotions on the horses.

So we have a kind of explanation for the act, but some dilemmas as Dysart decides he can cure Alan by muting his passion and senses, but in a way that means he will become as insulated from 'living' as Dysart feels himself to be, metaphorically bridled.