[In the following essay, Vandenbroucke declares that Equus is a modern myth that employs “elements of ritual, religion, and ceremony” to “fathom and capture basic truths of man and nature.”]
Camus tells us that myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. Peter Shaffer's most recent play, Equus, is a myth-like story with the integrity and rich overtones of the finest of artistic works. It is a modern myth, delicately probing a psyche formed by a mingling of modern forces and influences, yet reaching beyond to the concerns and problems of men of all ages. Equus is an arresting piece, a vast playground for the imagination.
The story is that of seventeen year old Alan Strang who has blinded six horses in a stable where he works and is placed in a psychiatric hospital under the care of Dr. Martin Dysart. It is clear, from the very beginning, that the play will move inexorably to the abreaction of Alan's outrageous act. In building to this conclusion Mr. Shaffer has created suspense and tension comparable with that of a mystery story. But, unlike the mystery story, the clues into Alan's background and psychology do not fit into a neat and tidy package. How can they? Mr. Shaffer provides no simple explication or pat lecture but a laboratory for inquiry; he clearly understands the complexities of the mind, understands that the motivation behind complex individual acts cannot be empirically delineated. Rather than providing the sharp lines of simplistic causal relationships, Mr. Shaffer has drawn the curves and parameters within which Alan acts.
The set is a simple wooden square raised a step above the stage proper, surrounded (except downstage) by a railing. Three benches are placed on the platform and others are located downstage right and left and upstage right and left. The simplicity of the set permits it to function as a wide variety of places—Dysart's office, the Strang home, a beach, a shop, a stable, an open field, and a movie theatre. All the actors remain on stage throughout the play, rising and mounting the platform when necessary, then returning to their benches around the perimeter of the platform to act as a Chorus. Upstage right and left are ladders from which are suspended the horse-masks, donned ritualistically at several points in the play by the horse-men. They are fashioned from curved pieces of silvery wire and strips of leather: haunting, masculine, highly suggestive. The horse-men wear platform-like stilts made of the same silvery wire/metal. Wearing their masks, clomping and scraping their hooves on the wooden boards, they evoke not only the sights and sounds of the stable but the very smell of manure.
The play is divided into two acts and thirty-five scenes indicating changes of time, location, or mood. Dysart acts as a narrator at times, explaining himself and the treatment of Alan to the court worker who has seen that Alan is admitted to the hospital rather than imprisoned. At other times Dysart addresses the audience directly—musing about himself or the development and unravelling of Alan's case. As Dysart begins to explain his sessions with Alan the “telling” of the scene shifts smoothly and skillfully to the actual portrayal of it. Similarly, in recounting an incident from his past, Alan may be joined by his parents for the dramatization of that actual moment. Repeated shifts in time are utilized: from present, to past, to further in the past, back to the present and so forth.
Dysart conducts his interviews of Alan methodically—urging, bribing, soothing, or tricking the boy as necessary. Bits and pieces of Alan's family and background are presented, impressed upon the mind, yet uneasily passed over. Each is important. But the way it fits into the puzzle that is Alan is unclear. The audience accompanies Dysart as he searches for clues and assembles them in his attempt to comprehend Alan. Mr. Shaffer starts slowly, using faint pencil marks which gradually become clearer and clearer, collectively creating the firm brush strokes which outline the boy. Each clue is like a pebble dropped into a placid pond: the ripples are visible but require time to make their impact on the shore. At their first interview Alan cannot speak but only sings jingles from advertisements and we learn that Alan's father refuses to allow a television in the home: “It's a dangerous drug.... Absolutely fatal mentally.” Books, learning, industry, self-improvement are Mr. Strang's values and he is deeply disappointed in his son's lethargy: “It's a disgrace when you come to think of it. You the son of a printer, and never opening a book!” The father is vaguely Marxist and an atheist, much upset at his wife's religiosity and its influence on Alan. He tells Dysart, “If you want my opinion, it's the Bible that's responsible for all this.” The remark seems simply reactionary and off-handed but sticks, uneasily, in one's mind. Alan's ex-school teacher mother is fond of reading her son stories from the Bible and stories about horses, “When Christian cavalry first appeared in the New World, the pagans thought horse and rider was one person.... It was only when the rider fell off they realized the truth.” She allows Alan to visit a neighbor to watch television. Alan claims to know more history than Dysart and asks him a string of questions ending with “Who said `Religion is the opium of the people'?” Dysart properly answers, “Karl Marx,” but Alan says that's the wrong answer. The apothegm is Mr. Strang's?
At the age of six, playing on a beach, Alan is offered a ride by a young horseman. It is gratefully accepted but soon interrupted by the frantic shrieks and protestations of over-protective parents. It appears this is the only time Alan has ridden a horse. This is baffling, for one assumes that a boy who so loves, even adores, horses would like nothing better than to ride them. But no, Alan claims (and is supported by his parents) to have ridden only the one occasion.
Alan once had in his room a picture of Jesus on his way to Calvary, chained and beaten mercilessly. Mr. Strang cannot tolerate the picture and replaces it with one of a horse: “A most remarkable picture, really. You very rarely see a horse taken from that angle—absolutely head-on.... It comes out all eyes.”
Mr. Strang visits Dysart and tells of a most peculiar rite he has witnessed a year or two previously. Alan, kneeling before the horse picture in his bedroom begins to chant a litany of equine genealogy: “And Legwus begat Neckwus. And Neckwus begat Fleckwus, the King of Spit. And Fleckwus spoke out of his chinkle-chankle! ... And he said `Behold—I give you Equus, my only begotten son!'” Alan fashions a bridle from a piece of string, places it over his head, and beats himself with a wooden coat hanger.
From this point the pace quickens and the clues come more easily as Dysart probes deeper and deeper—not blindly now, but with some ideas as to areas for inquiry. Alan recounts the ride on the beach: it was sexy. He looks at the horse and asks if the chain hurts. “Yes.”
Alan: It never comes out. They have me in chains.
Dysart: Like Jesus?
Alan: Yes!
Dysart: Only his name isn't Jesus, is it?
Alan: No.
Dysart: What is it?
Alan: No one knows but him and me.
Dysart: You can tell me, Alan. Name him.
Alan: Equus.
Dysart: Thank you. Does he live in all horses or just some?
Alan: All.
Dysart: (encouragingly) Go on, then. (Alan kneels.) Now tell me. Why is Equus in chains?
Alan: For the sins of the world.
Dysart: What does he say to you?
Alan: “I see you.” “I will save you.”
Persistently questioned, Alan reveals that he does ride horses: furtively, under cover of darkness he makes his secret pilgrimages to the stable-temple. He first puts sandals on the horse's feet/hooves, and then fixes the chinkle-chankle of bridle and bit. He gives the horse a lump of sugar—“His Last Supper.” Alan leads the horse into Ha Ha (the open field? the march to Golgotha?) and, stripped of his clothes, mounts the horse-man: “His neck comes out of my body.” He begins to ride, slowly at first, and the wooden platform, mounted on a giant ball bearing, is rotated by the attending horsemen: slowly, very slowly, gradually gaining speed as Alan and Equusrace through the night, faster and faster as they achieve the most complete of physical, emotional, and sexual unions and Alan shrieks, “Equus, I love you! Now! Bear me away.” The ride is over, sexual and spiritual communion achieved. Alan kisses the horse and whispers “Amen!” The first act ends, having achieved one of the most brilliant and arresting visual images ever staged.
On a date, perhaps his first, Alan is talked into seeing a blue movie where, of all people, he meets his father. Everyone has secrets. The girl entices Alan to walk to the stable, near her home. Excited by the movie and attracted by the girl's gentle seductive charm, he attempts to make love but is unable. “When I touched her, I feltHim. Under me.... His side waiting for my hand ... His flanks ... I refused him. I looked. I looked right at her ... and I couldn't do it. When I shut my eyes, I saw Him at once.” Mortified by his failure, he angrily, painfully, dismisses the girl. But Equus remains. “He'd seen everything—he was laughing ... mocking.” Alan reaches for a metal spike and blinds the horses. Shamed by his failure he lashes out, masochistically destroying a part of himself—the epicenter of his life, his god, his lover.
But while much of the focus has been on Alan, Dysart is no shadowy manipulator of the boy—no formal and precise automation attempting to simply cure Alan. Or is he? Dysart seeks self-knowledge even as he strives to understand Alan. He must confront himself as he confronts Alan, cure his own ills and unhappiness with that of Alan. “The thing is, I'm desperate. You see, I'm wearing that horse's head myself. That's the feeling. All reined up in old language and old assumptions, straining to jump clear-hoofed on to a whole new track of being I only suspect is there. I can't see it, because my educated, average head is being held at the wrong angle. I can't jump because the bit forbids it, and my own basic force—my horsepower, if you like—is too little.” He recounts a dream: he is an Hellenic chief priest officiating at the ritual sacrifice of a herd of five hundred children. Armed with a scalpel, he slits the stomachs and disembowels each child in turn. Somewhat nauseated after a time, he nonetheless fulfills his appointed task, fearful that any protest will result in his own sacrifice. Dysart dreams outrageous acts; Alan has committed one.
Dysart is undergoing “professional menopause.” He has no children and, asked by Alan if he has sex with his wife, dismisses the boy from his office—obviously upset at Alan's pointed and perceptive question. He has not even kissed his wife in six years. He is sterile. “The lowest sperm count you could find.” Is he sexually impotent as well? Perhaps. But is the patient's sexual impotence really any different from the doctor's vapid emotions and helpless inability to effect change in himself?
Dysart spends his evenings at home with his brisk and antiseptic wife, reading art books on Ancient Greece—the joys of which are completely beyond her comprehension. He exclaims, “I sit looking at pages of centaurs trampling the soil of Argos—and outside my window he is trying to become one.” Dysart is jealous of the boy who has lived and experienced passion, life itself, with a fervor he can never possibly achieve. “That boy has known a passion more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life. And let me tell you something: I envy it.”
What finally are we to make of this collage?
Returning to the idea of Equus as myth: a myth may be considered to be a story which addresses basic problems and situations not limited in relevance or interest to one society or era. It fills a need by the presentation of a model which provides an explanation (or at least a delineation) of various human conditions and situations. It is always symbolic of something greater than the characters, incidents, and rhetoric of the story itself. Within such a broad definition, many works seem to aspire to these very ends. Indeed, it is easily argued that all art strives to be larger than the form itself—seeking to fathom and capture basic truths of man and nature. But a myth must also contain elements of ritual, religion, and ceremony. It is in this sense thatEquus is truly mythical.
In his earlier The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Mr. Shaffer sought after the images and ritual to capture the essence of religious conflict, internal strife, and self-crucifixion. In Equus he has brilliantly found them, uniting subject and style: Hellenic-high-priest-Dysart's sacrifice of the herd of children, centaur-Alan's worship of his chinkle-chankle lord and ritualistic beating of himself, and, most perfectly of all, the communion of boy, horse, god, and lover in the Field of Ha Ha. Dysart might be speaking for any one of us when he states, “J've stared at such images before—or been stared at by them. But this one is the most alarming yet.”
The Greek tragedies presented characters of superhuman, regal, stature. But modern would-be egalitarian Western men are bereft of larger-than-life heroes and models to emulate. The modern myth must present its middle-class audiences a hero of its own proportion with which it may identify—a Willy Loman, a Martin Dysart.
The stories of the Greek tragedies were well known to the Hellenic audience and while the story of Equus is not well known, its backdrop is. Alan and Dysart have been molded by a search for experience, self-fulfillment, and meaning in their lives, the pressures of sexual performance and its attendant anxieties, the conflicts of religion, and strivings for a greater purpose. Christ, Marx, and Freud stand over their shoulders and these surely are the heroes of the Trojan war and gods of Olympus for Twentieth Century Western man. They are the trinity of contemporary myth-makers, confident in their ability to describe causes, predict results, and provide solutions. They aim to sate man's hunger for coherence and direction, his need to feel secure, and they endeavor to provide relief and comfort. Dysart pleads, “Look! Life is only comprehensible through a thousand local Gods. And not just the old dead ones with names like Zeus—no, but living Geniuses of Place and Person! And not just Greece but modern England.” The modern high-priest, exorcist, giver-of-light, knower-of-the-unknowable is the psychiatrist. Is there really any difference between baring one's soul in the confession box or on the analyst's couch? Satan's evil temptations towards impure thoughts, words, and actions have become the murmurings and eruptions of subconscious desires and the struggle between id and ego. Mrs. Strang tells Dysart, “You've got your words, and I've got mine. You call it a complex, I suppose. But if you knew God, Doctor, you would know about the Devil.” Yes, if.
Dysart has a fantasy of returning to a place by the seas—where gods used to live, before they died. “Gods don't die,” asserts Alan; but for Dysart they do. We need not take this as a Nietzschean remark. The gods have died for Dysart: life itself and meaning have died. Robbed of the center of his life, the giver of meaning, and answerer of questions, Dysart is lost—searching ardently but without direction for order and intelligibility. “I need—more than my children need me—a way of seeing in the dark.” Without his gods, his heroes, his pat answers, modern man searches desperately—for meaning, for understanding of the world he would so like to behold as a real home. He longs to be assured of some basic congruence between his aspirations for intelligibility and the essential constitution of reality. “Can you think of anything worse one can do to anybody than take away their worship? ... it's the core of his life. What else has he got? Think about him.... He's a modern citizen for whom society doesn't exist.... Without worship you shrink, it's as brutal as that.”
Despite his reservations, Dysart will effect a cure: the illicit passions will be eliminated—replaced by the socially acceptable but loathsome ennui that consumes Dysart. Which is preferable? “My desire might be to make this boy an ardent husband—a caring citizen—a worshiper of an abstract and unifying God. My achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost! ... Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.” Alan will be stripped of that which Dysart so earnestly desires.
The grace, delicacy, and restraint which Mr. Shaffer has called upon to perfect his statement must not be taken lightly. They are the marks of a master craftsman about his trade. Equus is an extraordinarily ambitious effort, movingly successful in its total impact. It is a finely wrought statement, redolent with meaning, certain to be performed and remembered for generations to come. Equus is the apogee of Mr. Shaffer's work to date. We eagerly await his next attempt to scale even greater heights.
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