Equus (1977)
Directed by Sidney Lumet

Film Review

Peter Shaffer's celebrated play Equus was created for the stage and this is unquestionably the only medium where it can deliver its full visceral impact.  Its boldly minimalist stylisation - a daring appropriation of ancient Greek theatre - is such an important part of the play's construction that any attempt to give it a naturalistic staging must surely fail.  If it were to be made into a film, surely it would be pure folly to frame Equus as a conventional drama, its weird designs laden with symbolism sacrificed on the altar of mainstream conformity?  Since its release in 1977, Sidney Lumet's screen adaptation of Shaffer's play has polarised opinion - some see it as an inspired interpretation that brought a highly pertinent stage play to a wider audience, others as a flagrant betrayal of one of the greatest literary works of the 20th century.

Equus is certainly an ambitious film and without Shaffer's input as a screenwriter it would surely have failed.  Comparing it with the stage version is a tempting but pretty futile exercise - it is a work that should be judged on its own merits, an alternative interpretation rather than a straight stage-to-screen transposition of Shaffer's scarily idiosyncratic play.  By setting the story in a world that is more familiar to us Lumet gives Shaffer's play a greater sense of immediacy, and whilst the nightmarish mystique of the original is lost, there is still much that disturbs and provokes.  What the film does achieve, in common with the play, is to expose one of the most insidious malaises to afflict contemporary society: a surrender to an anaesthetising materialistic conformity that not only robs us of our identity, but also dulls our senses and prevents us from experiencing life in its fullest intensity.

Reprising the roles that they had earlier played (to great acclaim) on stage, Richard Burton and Peter Firth both turn in performances that are not just spellbinding but spine-chillingly authentic.  As the disillusioned psychoanalyst sickened by the lack of passion in his life, Burton is the more disturbing of the two, and it is through the slow disintegration of his inner world that we see what Schaffer intended us to see, modern society enslaved by the cult of normalcy, as sterile and lifeless as the crumbling remnants of an ancient civilisation.  Firth's Alan Strang (possibly the most challenging character to play on stage, and not just because of the incredibly demanding nude scenes) is less a mentally deranged pervert and more a beacon of hope in a wasteland of deadening conformity.  Of all the characters on screen, Alan is the only one who is capable of experiencing the agonies and ecstasies of a fleshly existence.  This is rendered most powerfully in the film's most lyrical sequence in which the teenager achieves a state of spiritual coitus with the horse which he has placed at the centre of his pagan belief system.  At the searing climax of Alan's horseback ritual, the image freezes and dissolves to white - the moment lingers and for a brief moment we catch a glimpse of that primeval intensity of being which we, well-adjusted adults trained and restrained by the conventions of our cellophane-wrapped normality, can never ourselves experience.

The other scene of notoriety in Scaffer's play is dealt with somewhat less successfully and takes the shine of what is otherwise a remarkable production.  The scene in which Alan, in the throes of a truly horrendous psycho-sexual conflict, attacks and blinds six horses is the dramatic highpoint of the original play, but in Lumet's film it is a gruesome spectacle of Grand Guignol horror that fails both dramatically and artistically.  This is the one part of Equus where a stylised staging is probably essential for it to have any real dramatic impact.  A rapid montage of shots of horses having their eyes gouged out by a sickle can only arouse revulsion; the bleak symbolism is lost in a grotesque orgy of horror and any sympathy we had for Alan evaporates in a second as we see him as society is bound to judge him, as a monster that must be chained and tamed.  After the shock of seeing Jenny Agutter totally naked this is just too much.  Equus ends leaving a nasty aftertaste and it is only Burton's final monologue (made more powerful by a mesmerising close-up of the actor at his most terrifying) that allows us to see beyond this artistic lapse and witness the true horror that lies beyond.

Film Synopsis

Martin Dysart is a middle-aged psychiatrist who reluctantly takes on the case of Alan Strang, a withdrawn 17-year old who has recently blinded six horses for no apparent reason.  Dysart begins by interviewing the boy's parents and is struck by their contrasting personalities.  Frank Strang's dominating persona appears to be a front for his deep-rooted insecurity and he resents his wife Dora's determined attempts to indoctrinate their son into her dogmatic Christian beliefs.  Despite their claims to be loving parents, Frank and Dora are poles apart and their marriage is a loveless sham.  At first, Dystart has difficulty getting the disturbed adolescent to open up, but slowly Alan begins to speak and the reason for his terrible crime gradually becomes apparent.  As he listens, Dysart ponders on his own inadequacies and begins to envy his patient, seeing within him a capacity for experiencing the intensity of life that he has never known...