Equus

Equus is a most remarkable play.  Written for an intelligent, perceptive, thoughtful audience, and largely featuring an almost prescient psychiatrist and his young patient, it plays perfectly seriously, through the psychiatrist’s desperate considerations of the sanity of his own profession, with some of life’s philosophical questions that might not even occur to us otherwise, turning them on themselves.  The psychiatrist’s envy of a morbid religious ecstasy makes him somewhat less believable, but nevertheless this recursive examination of motive, meaning, and ability lays bare perhaps even more than two of the leads do in the play’s sex scene—and they laid bare everything.  Its major weakness lies in its failure to reveal a credible explanation for the patient’s condition.

Casting was not entirely fortunate, in my view, but the actors were convincing enough to give a powerful performance of this examination of what it is to be yourself.  In particular, Ian Croker’s rendition of a frustrated working-class father concerned for his boy was entirely consistent and restrained.  But special mention must go also to the chorus, whose wonderful control of horse-head frames imbued the stage fully with the spirits of six horses through the exact motions with which we’d see real horses respond to the events around them.

Costuming and props played little part in this production except in being consistent with the times. Repertory’s set was adaptable, convincing, and particularly original, and lighting added much to the edge-of-sanity atmosphere that parts of the play required; and the creative sound track merged in perfect time with live events.

John P. Harvey

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