Equus at the Menier Chocolate Factory Theatre
You may never see a better production of Peter Shaffer’s eerily disturbing Seventies classic Equus – about a boy who blinds horses – than this one.
The show, at the Menier Chocolate Factory, features Maggie Smith’s son Toby Stephens, alongside former Strictly contestant and Sherlock star Amanda Abbington.
It’s been a problem play for me in the past – the problem being that I’ve never found it particularly eerie… or disturbing.
But all that’s changed here, thanks to some truly riveting ensemble performances, led by Stephens as overworked, self-loathing psychiatrist Martin Dysart.
Dysart is experiencing what he calls a ‘professional menopause’. He is troubled by macabre dreams and feels unable to help the young people he treats.
So he’s not thrilled when an anxious local magistrate (Abbington) persuades him to see 17-year-old Alan (Waterloo Road’s Noah Valentine), who has inexplicably put out the eyes of six horses.
It’s an astonishing performance by Valentine, making his theatrical debut in a visceral and demanding role full of naked vulnerability – literally, in one scene, where he must shed all his clothes.
Alan refuses to speak at first, but Dysart soon learns of his troubled relationship with his devout mother and atheist father.
You may never see a better production of Peter Shaffer’s eerily disturbing Seventies classic Equus – about a boy who blinds horses – than this one, writes Marmion
The show, at the Menier Chocolate Factory, features Maggie Smith’s son Toby Stephens, alongside former Strictly contestant and Sherlock star Amanda Abbington (above)
So he’s not thrilled when an anxious local magistrate (Abbington) persuades him to see 17-year-old Alan (above) (Waterloo Road’s Noah Valentine)
He starts to see parallels between the boy’s semi-religious obsession with horses, and his own fascination with Greek myth.
What makes Lindsay Posner’s dream-like revival particularly astonishing is a chorus of young dancers who, bare-chested and smeared in muck, sit silently, hands on knees at the back of the shadowy black stage like ghostly sentinels.
Embodying the horses that Alan loved – but also wounded – they come to symbolise the primitive, homoerotic forces in his mind, which is seething with hormones and sexual confusion.
Stephens is brilliant as the beleaguered psychiatrist, unable to have children and persecuted by feelings of sexual failure.
Robed in suburban corduroy, he consoles himself with private fantasies of antiquity, and envies Alan’s primitive energy, which is so eerily embodied by the chorus of dancers.
Their hushed movement, sinuously choreographed by James Cousins and backed by Adam Cork’s subterranean sound effects, is spooky and magical.
As individual horses, they shift heavily around the dark stage, but they also combine as a single galloping steed to bear Alan aloft.
Mesmerising, unnerving and unexpectedly moving, this is a fine show well worthy of West End livery.
Equus is booking until July 4.
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