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Equus
An Oscar-nominated Richard Burton and Peter Firth star in Sidney Lumet's adaptation of Peter Shaffer's acclaimed play. A disturbed teenager gouges out the eyes of six horses but it's psychiatrist Burton whose most basic assumptions are challenged
A massive hit when it premiered on the stage in 1973 and subsequently a staple on drama school syllabuses around the world, Peter Shaffer's strange and unsettling play 'Equus' was one of the pivotal theatrical works of the 70s - a fact director Sidney Lumet acknowledges by not really adapting it for the screen at all. Fortunately, in Burton and Firth he has two actors capable of bringing Shaffer's dense script to life, even if some of the subtleties are squeezed out by a general sense of rising hysteria. The story, a complex conflation of religion, sex, myth and madness, follows 17-year-old stable-boy Alan Strang (Firth) as he seeks psychiatric treatment after gouging out the eyes of six horses with a metal spike. Dealing with the case is Dr Martin Dysart (Burton), a man beginning to doubt both the effectiveness and the ethics of psychiatric treatment. What is his job, he wonders, if not to eliminate all the savagery and passion of his patients and return them to a dreadful, deadening normality? "Normal is the good smile in a child's eyes," he says in one of several monologues delivered to the camera. "It's also the dead stare in a million adults. And I am its priest." The film builds gradually and early scenes - Alan's determination to communicate only by singing lines from TV commercials, for example - are critical of a culture which in Shaffer's eyes fail to satisfy a basic need for mystery and myth. But as the bond between doctor and patient deepens, Dysart comes to feel sympathy for Alan and the bizarre, erotically-charged world he's created - a world in which the boy trusses himself up with a homemade bridle and beats himself with a coat hanger while worshipping a picture of Equus, the horse god who rules him. Lumet, whose films (Dog Day Afternoon, Network) have frequently touched on issues of alienation and estrangement, here adopts an approach that's probably too naturalistic - it is, essentially, a film of a very talky play. Consequently there's a sense in which some of the issues never quite leave the seminar room. Towards the end, however, Burton taps into the immense power of Shaffer's lines and when he describes his jealousy of Alan - of the direct line to pagan ecstasy which the boy's madness allows - issue and execution do come together effectively. It isn't always easy to unpick the many tangled strands at play here and the conclusion deliberately raises more questions than it answers. But Shaffer's writing, powerful performances and the sheer strangeness of the tale make this intense, compelling and frequently uneasy - in every sense of the word. Verdict Threatens to collapse beneath the weight of its own symbols and philosophising, but somehow it never does. Built around great performances by Burton and Firth, it's a weighty, wordy, thought-provoking drama that contains moments of great power. |
