 With a major production of
Equus being staged in London"s West End for the first time since the seventies, this interpretation
of the play is intended for those who may not have sufficient background knowledge in
classical mythology and Christian religion to pick up on some elements in Peter
Shaffer"s work. It is intended for those
who already know the story, and indeed it presupposes that the reader has prior
knowledge of the plot.
The title itself, Equus,
informs us that horses figure into the narrative.
It is quickly established that Alan Strang is a disturbed young man in
need of psychiatric care; he has blinded six horses in a stable. From there, through the work of therapist
Martin Dysart, we learn bit by bit about Alan’s life, and in particular, of
incidents in it involving horses.
The first of the play’s
two climactic scenes finally reveals the profound depth of the role of the
horse in Alan’s psyche. Raised to love
God, Alan has nonetheless substituted Equus for Jesus, with his deity embodied
in every horse. Under hypnosis, Alan
reveals the primal nature and the intensity of his devout love and worship. In a fully developed ritual, he rides naked
and bareback at night, using a switch to beat himself (instead of using it as a
riding crop). His ride continues to the
point of sexual/religious climax when he shouts of his love and devotion, and
his desire to fuse as one with the horse.
Of course our initial
reaction is shock – Alan is one massively disturbed bloke. And yes, the first interpretation of what has
happened is the profane one.
Yet there is reason to
admire what Shaffer achieved here. As
outrageous and seemingly diabolical as this is, Shaffer took care to craft the
worshipful Alan and his god credibly. It
looks on the surface like Shaffer just pushed as far as he could to provoke,
and if we don’t see past that, then the whole thing is just ridiculous. Knowing that religious beliefs and practices,
spanning more than two thousand years of western culture, informs this scene
helps us make sense of it—and allows for understanding of the play’s deeper layers
of meaning.
Alan reached a point in
his young, impressionable life when he found God inaccessible - symbolically,
but oddly enough also quite literally, from the actions of his father when the
man tore a picture of Christ off the bedroom wall. Instead of lapsing, as would be more
usual for others, Alan substituted Equus for Jesus. This is Shaffer’s single biggest conceit
where he asks the audience to faithfully leap with him. We need only make the leap, and then we are
subject to the consistent internal logic of Alan’s spiritual life. We are to understand that Alan lives by a
moral code that parallels Christian morality, except that Equus is God.
Alan remains devout as
he was taught to be by his mother. He
reflects often on the suffering of Equus, pained by the chain in his mouth. "Why is Equus in chains? For the sins of the world."
The theme of suffering runs throughout the play. As strongly as any chain, it links together
Jesus, Equus, and Alan whose passion
is exhilarating to Dysart, but can only be seen as pained by the counterbalancing voice of Hesther Salomon. (In fact the word ‘passion’ which we understand describes powerful emotions, is rooted
in ‘passio’, Latin for ‘suffering’, and Shaffer had made this
explicit by the time he adapted his own play for the film script of Equus.)
In theology, Christ’s
suffering during His trial and crucifixion is known as The Passion. Modern
Christianity still encourages reflection on His suffering as pious practice,
but in addition to that, for most of Christian history, the Church taught that
Heaven was attained through suffering,
and followers didn’t just limit themselves to reflecting on The Passion of
Christ. Thirteenth and fourteenth
century flagellants beat themselves, a practice for the extravagantly devout,
but eventually declared heretical. (There are still modern day religious
flagellants.)
Given this, one can’t say
Alan is outside the bounds of being conventionally religious in the time and
energy he devotes to meditating on Equus’ suffering. His misfortune is that he is ill, and not
under anyone’s knowing care. He suffers genuine mental anguish, but knows only
to offer up his suffering to his God.
That Alan suffers and Equus suffers allows for Alan’s close
identification with Equus. That’s not
negative, but his mental illness has him in a self-sustaining loop where his
practice of reflecting on pain and all he identifies with it, feeds his
suffering.
In fact, several Christian
saints offered up intense physical
and spiritual pain in devotion to God.
St. Teresa is but one example, and furthermore, hers is an example where
her suffering culminates in her mystical union with God. Today in our secular world, we would confuse
the language of the saints in speaking of their love of God with the language
of earthly love. It’s unavoidable,
probably because our profane language borrows from the saints’ writings
attempting to relate the intense sweetness of spiritual love to those of us
with no experience of it.
Part of the reason why some people find
Alan freakish is because Christian saints are freakish. They are literally extraordinary, and their
experiences and practices have always been far removed from the norm. If anyone approached us on the street, and
told us that God speaks to him, we would not know whether he was a saint or he
was deranged.
Without sex in the mix, Alan’s
religious fervor alone is not sufficient to drive the play to the dramatic
height it achieves at its first climax.
Riding clothed, engaged in his ritual – that wouldn’t convey to the audience
anywhere close to the same degree of disturbance.
The single most powerful
element in Alan’s ritual with which the audience relates is his sexual
climax. We each have personal experience
of it; we know of its power, and it’s there on stage to gobsmack us. We may not readily understand that it’s
evocative of the spiritual ecstasy of saints, but that doesn’t matter to the
dramatic purpose it serves.1
If no horse were involved,
there should also be enough of us who would admit that Alan’s desire to fuse
with his love is not an uncommon one.
(There are times when your senses have left you too; you find even sex
is not close enough; and you strangely wish your flesh would melt together with
your lover’s.) This desire to literally
merge together is no byproduct of modern, sexually liberated mores. It is already found in Greek myth from two
thousand five hundred years ago, a fact which speaks powerfully of its
universality (The story of
Hermaphroditus is one with a literal fusion of two individuals, but a more
relevant example comes from Aristophanes’ speech recorded by Plato).
So, when Shaffer
makes a point of informing us that pagan peoples first thought horse and rider
were one when they first encountered Europeans on horseback, and then has Alan
shouting out he wants to be one with his horse at the point of his climax, the
play taps into what Jung defined as our ‘collective
unsconscious’, i.e., the continuing psychic tendencies in society. In our little brains, we have a deep-seated
feeling for Alan’s desire, shocking though it be to our conscious mind.
It is Dysart, of course,
who brings to conscious realization that Alan’s worship and his relationship
with Equus, also owe much to the cults and mystery religions of the ancient
eastern Mediterranean (which remained more
influenced by Greek culture than by Roman).
It is no coincidence in the play that Dysart’s personal interest is in
these Mediterranean cultures.
While it may be difficult
to expect many in the audience would pick up on Alan’s more extreme actions
having touch-points in various practices strewn through the history of
Christianity, certainly the whole theatre should find the notion of ‘pagan
ritual’ being impressed upon them by the orgiastic elements of Alan’s
ride. Alan’s frenzy is dramatic, but it
is by no means purely theatrical.
The
Cult of Dionysus2 is but the most obvious example of several ancient
religions whose practices were frenzied and furious, and whose practitioners
pursued ecstasy, religious and otherwise. The most elementary forms of
mysticism feature in common a belief in the possibility of a union between the
worshipper and the object of worship, and this union does in some practices,
take the form of sexual communion.
Communion between
worshipper and worshipped is simply what the human psyche needs from religion. It has always been the challenge of every
religion to sustain faith by making this connection a genuinely felt
experience. The instant that Alan believed divinity was physically
embodied in something within his grasp, his religion could not possibly fail to
hold him enthralled. Dysart understood
this, and was thrilled.
But of course, as soon as
we understand this too (through Dysart), Shaffer explores the further
consequences of having God within man’s reach.
And thus we come to the play’s second climactic scene.
There is not a small
amount of irony in the religiously minded taking umbrage at the sex scene
between Alan and the girl Jill. Not just
because it is a non-event, but further, nothing happens precisely because Alan is overcome with the immorality of it. Alan could be the Church’s poster boy for no sex
between unmarried couples. (Recall that
Alan’s morality is that of the conventionally religious, aside from Equus being
God.)
We in the secular world
don’t have an appreciation anymore for the crippling fear of sin found in an
Alan Strang. Against such a challenge,
Shaffer has to impress on his audience how profoundly troubling sinning is for
Alan, so Shaffer reaches and invokes the first sin, the original sin, the Fall
of Man from Eden.
Adam and Eve were created
naked, and lived that way in paradise until they ate from the forbidden Tree of
Knowledge. Succumbing to temptation and
eating the forbidden fruit – that is the first sin. Adam was then aware of his
nakedness, and ‘shame’ came into
being. Adam tried to hide his nakedness, and he tried to hide from God because
he had sinned.
The climactic scene in
Equus alludes to this Fall in Genesis. Alan is overcome with the immorality of
what he attempts with Jill, of succumbing to temptation. Alan has absorbed more
deeply than most the lesson that God is all-seeing and all-knowing. He is not able to resolve the problem that
there is no privacy from God’s eye/ Equus’ eye available for anyone, for any act
of sexual intimacy. What’s more, he has
absorbed from all the times his mother has read to him that God, as written in
the Bible, is a jealous God. (Thus Equus
is a jealous god.)
The vehemence with
which Alan recoils from Jill is not due to the embarrassment of not being able
to perform. His shame is not the garden
variety shame of an impotent man - it is the burning shame of Eden. He
tries to hide his nakedness; tries to hide from God/Equus in profound spiritual
agony. But his agony is so deep that he
snaps. He is unable to bear further the burdens of his continual suffering and
his sin, and he lashes out in violence.
He blinds the horses in a desperate attempt to keep from Equus’
eye. It is not cathartic; he is overcome
by even more agony for this violence, and then he is unconscious.
This is the second of the
pair of events Shaffer uses as bookends for Alan’s uncommon spiritual
life. The first was the conceit of Alan
substituting Equus for God, when the more mundane outcome might have been Alan becoming
a lapsed Christian. Here with the
second, Alan is just like many other mortal men broken by the demands of obedient
worship and attendant suffering - he lashes out against God. It is so common that worship, freely and
joyfully given to start, takes on an edge of resentment when self-sacrifice and
self-denial train on. For Alan too,
lashing out against God might have been unremarkable, except that Alan’s god
was within his reach. (Shaffer has quite
the wicked sense of humour.)
In closing this
discussion, I would just address the controversy about playing this final
climactic scene in the nude. That the
scene alludes to the nakedness in Eden
makes it the very definition of ‘non-gratuitous’. It is a nude scene referring directly to the nude scene which is ultimately
responsible for why nudity is held to be immoral in the first place. That single image in the Bible of hiding
nakedness out of shame is so powerful that it has distinguished the
Judeo-Christian world from other cultures in how it deals with nudity.
If we don’t understand
that the force driving Alan’s violence is absolutely biblical in its magnitude,
then we don’t understand what is happening at all. How else could the play
possibly communicate this powerful allusion to the nakedness and shame in Eden if its staging were
too fainthearted to employ the most direct means for doing so? It would make a
mockery of theatre being a visual medium, and mutilate the whole play. Do away
with the nudity, and what one ends up with is a nonsensical scene where Alan is
shamed in his non-nakedness, and the blinding of the horses signifies nothing.
Footnotes:
1. It is
entirely possible for the art of the theatre to stage a subtle
visual reference to such saintly spiritual ecstasy. The end of Act I has Alan lying at the foot
of his horse. The positioning of Alan
and the horse, along with lighting effects could recreate the tableau of The
Ecstasy of Saint Theresa, an altarpiece by Gian Lorenzo Bernini which is
probably the best known depiction of spiritual ecstasy in western art.
2. Personally,
I have long wondered if Shaffer chose the name Dysart after Dionysus, Dysart
being the advocate for the style of Dionysus’ cult. His advocacy is opposed by Hesther Salomon
whose name is surely deliberate. Hester
is a medieval variant of Esther, who saves Jews from persecution in The Old
Testament’s Book of Esther. The wisdom
of Solomon as a judge needs no retelling here.
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