(seen at the performance on 14th June 2026)
Seven years since the thrilling Theatre Royal, Stratford East production, Lindsay Posner and team take a very different approach.
This is mostly about how psychiatrist Martin Dysart (Toby Stephens) perceives troubled horse-blinding teenager Alan Strang (Noah Valentine). It is very clear that Stephens’s Dysart sees something of Strang in himself – perhaps far more than he lets on.
Valentine is slight, a Krait of a boy. Deadly poison produced often from cowering fear. Today, he would have been referred to a CAMS clinic and medicated years before. Here, we see clearly the prehistoric nature of 1970s mental health treatment.
It is impressive for such a young actor to hold himself so strongly in every scene with a master like Stephens. Sharing a cigarette, trading intellectual blows, the timing and trust as each strips the other’s defences and enters through the smoking holes blown.
Taking this approach, Posner almost entirely relegates the rest of the cast and much of the thematic meaning of the play.
Strang’s parents Frank and Dora (Colin Mace / Emma Cunniffe) become incidental to their son’s development. There only to interject with short anecdotes for the most part, both capture perfectly their period upbringing, manner and attitudes to life. Mace, in particular, has the officious shamble of ex-serviceman turned artisan, so familiar to many.
Playing a single key scene with their son, the production reaches its zenith too soon. Movement director James Cousins uses an ensemble of five dancers to create a single horse, ridden by Ed Mitchell. The childhood interaction is heartbreaking, theatricality breathtaking.
At other times, the dancers are solo horses, often wating patiently at the back of the stage to appear, creating a stable with grace when required. Visually satisfying, as are Paul Farnsworth’s bare thrust stage with four benches, spikes above; and Paul Pyant’s highly skilled lighting design heightening the drama.
The problem is that we do not quite feel the connection between Peter Shaffer’s themes and the dramatic thread.
Bella Aubin’s stable girl Jill Mason, Amanda Abbington’s magistrate Hester Salomon and stable owner Harry Dalton (David Rubin, pictured – we were right on Raducanu) are real people, not – like Equus himself – observers facilitating Alan’s mounting paranoia.
Questioning the role of faith does not feel at the forefront. Mason, Salomon and Dalton are decent people shocked at the action, not questioning the deeper meaning. Far more in tune with the times, yet arguably exactly the opposite of Shaffer’s intent to open the debate decades before society reached the point it has now.
For a fifty-year-old play to still feel relevant say much about its construction. The monkey was left with a feeling that in a century’s time, it will be held in the same regard as “Hamlet” – an historical record we know is vital, offering a relevance and wisdom resonating still.
This production may not quite have the emotional impact of other revivals, but proves that there is available far more than a single interpretation of this modern classic.
4 stars.