Equus on Broadway by Peter Shaffer

 

Equus Playwright

Peter Shaffer

For many of those who saw the original production of Equus, it remains an extraordinarily powerful theatrical memory. Yet the piece has not been revived in the West End until 2007.

“Hearing the text again made me realize that the play had not fundamentally dated and that it seemed fresh and still very much full of life,” reveals Peter Shaffer, commenting on the workshop of Equus at which the team that mounted the West End production was assembled. “I think everyone who was present at the reading felt the same. I always approach the idea of reviving one of my plays with a good deal of apprehension. You’re asked to look at your work again, written 30 or 40 years ago in a style which you no longer possess. You worry that any rewrites you do will stick out like a sore thumb. Then you may have directors come to you, seeking your permission to do one of your plays. I have a great new concept for Equus, they say. This time everybody will be naked.”

“It wasn’t a specific decision not to do the play,” Shaffer explains. “But it’s true that I didn’t feel especially enthused about anybody doing it again. Then it occurred to me that there must be a lot of people, especially young people, who had probably never attended a professional production of Equus and I began to feel a tremendous desire to see the play once more. Getting the right Alan Strang was crucial and it seemed the right moment to go ahead with it.”

In a way, the part of Strang can be compared to Juliet since actors of the correct age are unlikely to have acquired either the requisite stage or life experience which playing these roles demands.

“I think that Peter Firth, the original Alan, had done some television drama but not much,” says Shaffer. “Whoever plays Strang doesn’t have to be 17 in reality but he does need to be able to convey a rawness, an impressionability and a sensitivity.”

Part of Shaffer’s initial reluctance to sanction a new production of Equus may be due to the tremendous impact of John Dexter’s original staging in 1973. Just as actors tend to shy away from roles in which one of their colleagues has recently shone, so there was some unease among theatre practitioners of working on this new Equus, even at a distance of 34 years. Equally for Shaffer there must also be an immense amount of emotional weight attached to his memories of that original production. Certainly he and Dexter formed a formidable double act through the 1960s and 1970s with The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Black Comedy and Equus. Their professional relationship had been launched when Dexter’s eye was caught be a single stage direction ‘They cross the Andes’, in the manuscript of The Royal Hunt of the Sun.

“John responded enormously to closed social situations and confined communities, whether it was the national servicemen in Chips with Everything, the crew in Billy Budd or the riding stables in Equus. When he queried the line about the Andes in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, he told me he wouldn’t direct the play if I took it out. I knew then that I had found my director.”

No writer, especially in the theatre, can predict how new work will be received. But Shaffer seems genuinely at a loss to explain why his best-known plays have made such an international impact. He recalls the differing reactions of Equus in London and New York. The play enjoyed tremendous success in both the West End and on Broadway but Shaffer was fascinated by the contrasting ways in which audiences connected with Equus.

“In England, there was an outcry over the perceived cruelty to horses. In America, I was accused of cruelty to psychiatrists. In England in the 1970s, if you said you were seeing a psychiatrist, people would automatically assume that you were bonkers. But in New York, everybody was in analysis and in the 1970s it was fairly strict Freudian analysis. When the American audience saw Dysart become increasingly critical of his own profession and heard him express doubts about its efficacy, they were shocked. They laughed at the jokes about psychiatrists in slightly guilty sniggers, as if they were schoolchildren hearing their martinet of a headmaster being sent up.”

Shaffer insists that he’s not attacking the psychiatric profession in Equus; he’s merely questioning what he sees as its assumption of infallibility.

“In New York in the 1970s analysis was the new religion. I’ve heard of priests who came to doubt their faith but I’ve never heard of psychiatrists expressing doubts about the validity of their credo.”

As we know, Shaffer’s original inspiration for Equus was a real-life incident of a boy attacking and mutilating horses in Suffolk. Once that initial spark had been lit, Shaffer found himself borne along on the currents of creativity.

“Equus was like nothing I’d ever written before and it flowed very easily. I was putting together a very complex structure. In a way, it’s a kind of detective story, with all the clues scattered along throughout the first act. The story of that boy in Suffolk wouldn’t let me go. I became an obsessive about it.” 

It’s often forgotten that Shaffer’s first major success in the theatre came with Five Finger Exercise in 1958. In many ways, it was a standard, well-made play, a piece of naturalism far removed from any scaling of the Andes, as demanded in The Royal Hunt for the Sun only six years later. Why the radical change in style?

”It wasn’t that I disliked the well-made play,” he explains. “I loved the idea of it and I’m a great admirer of [Terrence] Rattigan’s work, the epitome of the well-made play. But I did feel constrained by it and I wanted audiences to use their imagination much more. The influence of film, which is such a literal medium, means the imagination is a much underused muscle in all of us. That was my reason for slipping in the line about the Andes – in a way it was a challenge to the director and to the audience. With Equus, the whole play is a challenge and I want any production to provoke a mix of terror and beauty. I believe that the theatre is the greatest of the arts and not the Cinderella. People used to say – what fun, the theatre! – as if it were a mere frivolity and not to be compared with the sublime excellence achieved by a poem or a piece of music.”

Nevertheless, Shaffer confesses, “I don’t like some of my plays” although he concedes that “it hurts me very much when some critics viciously attack them.” He continues, “I’m very fond of Equus and Amadeus and Black Comedy for which I had a wonderful cast: Maggie Smith and Albert Finney, Derek Jacobi and Graham Crowden. And I enjoy the revivals, particularly if I can have a hand in them.”

Now in his early 80s, Shaffer has been wielding his pen once more over minor rewrites for Equus. “We’ve replaced the word ‘swizz’ for the more contemporary ‘con’,” and he’s actively engaged on two new plays, including the long-gestating project about Tchaikovsky.

“I’m still here,” he asserts in triumph. “I’m not finished yet!”

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