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.

{mosgoogle right} 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 Dionysus_² 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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