Backstory: Saddle Up for the Story (Behind the Hype) of Equus

Mad About the Boy
The seed for Equus was planted sometime around 1971. Peter Shaffer was driving with a friend through the bleak English countryside and remarked on the abundance of stables. The friend shared a story he'd heard at a recent dinner party in London about a disturbed young man who'd blinded 26 horses with a spike one night. "He knew only [that] horrible detail, and his complete mention of [the story] could barely have lasted a minute," Shaffer wrote in 1973. "But it was enough to arouse in me an intense fascination."

Shaffer's friend would die a few months later, and since this was a good 27 years before the invention of Google, the playwright was left with no one to verify or expand on the facts. But the phrases "disturbed young man" and "blinded 26 horses with a spike" were all the building blocks he needed. Besides, Shaffer didn't want to do the In Cold Blood thing. "I knew very strongly that I wanted to interpret it in some entirely personal way," he wrote. "I am grateful now that I have never received confirmed details of the 'real' story, since my concern has been more and more with a different kind of exploration."

Now there's an understatement: Shaffer constructed an unconventional narrative about a disenchanted psychiatrist, Martin Dysart, and his latest patient, Alan Strang, a troubled 17-year-old in custody after stabbing a stable full of horses in the eyes. Shaffer changed the injured to just six. It quickly becomes evident that Strang really digs horses, and not in a platonic fashion. His obsession has become a private religion, with a god figure Strang calls Equus. Giving the story an extra shot of psychosexual subversion, the finished script specified that the horses must be played by actors.

In order to anchor such flights of theatrical fancy, Shaffer enlisted a distinguished child psychiatrist to pinpoint any phony baloney. Hence a scene involving hypnosis by flashing light was rewritten to incorporate a less theatrical, more practical method that doctors actually used in real life.

Peter Firth dances with horses in rehearsals top and onstage

The cumulative effect turned the Equus experience into something like a spectator sport. And a terrifying one at that. The show reduced audiences to a "breathless silence," as Shaffer recently recalled in the New York Post. "You could feel that silence solidifying around you. You could almost tap on [it]."

Transferring to the Plymouth Theatre in 1974, Equus made its big Broadway splash with Anthony Hopkins as Dysart. Firth reprised his turn as Strang, and would later star in the film as well. Rehearsals were often tense, as Hopkins didn't much care for director John Dexter, who persistently called him "Miriam." Hopkins once told London's Time Out, "One morning he screamed at me: 'Come on, Miriam, these are the only decent fucking lines that Ruby Shaffer has written in many a decade, so let's have the bloody things right! None of this backstreet Richard Burton acting!'"

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There were moment of levity, however. According to Michael Feeney Callan's biography Anthony Hopkins, Dexter boosted company morale by asking Hopkins to play his scenes as a series of impersonations during the final run-through. Hopkins obliged with a litany of Brando, Olivier, Cagney and Burton. "It was so funny and brilliant," castmate Marian Seldes recalled in her autobiography, The Bright Lights. "It broke the nervousness of opening night."

Scenes from the Equus movie, featuring Richard Burton and Peter Firth

Picture This
Some plays lend themselves to cinematic interpretation. A play whose cast of characters includes men dressed as horses ain't one of them. And yet in 1977, Equus became a Hollywood movie, starring the master of backstreet acting himself, Richard Burton.

As Equus continued its Broadway run, Hopkins had been succeeded by Burton, whose performance was hailed as a "comeback" and earned the actor a special-honor Tony Award in 1976. Around that time, Shaffer asked film director Sidney Lumet—who'd made respected movies from Long Day's Journey into Night, A View from the Bridge and Orpheus Descending known onscreen as The Fugitive Kind—to tackle Equus. They spent a year working on the project before filming began.

Initially reluctant to sign on, Lumet insisted on two things: The horses in the film had to be real, and the violence had to be depicted, not pantomimed. "A boy who blinds six horses is not your average hero," Lumet said at the time. "If you're going to show the boy's magnificence and Dysart's envy of him, you've got get into the area of his horror, also."

Not everyone agreed. Although it earned Oscar nominations for Burton, Firth and Shaffer's screenplay, the movie was attacked by major critics and animal rights activists, who considered the blinding scene to be too bloody and realistic. Even Shaffer admitted to being horrified and later accused Lumet of imitating the shower scene in Psycho.

Harry Potter on the Couch
If Equus seemed to fade from the cultural radar, that was intentional on Shaffer's part. For almost 30 years, he resisted all requests for a West End revival. When he finally changed his mind and gave producer David Pugh the rights after nearly a decade of negotiations, Shaffer insisted on veto power

Daniel Radcliffe, the draw of today's Equus

The combination of Radcliffe and his Harry Potter "uncle," Tony winner Richard Griffiths, as Dysart sparked $4 million in advance sales, and the West End revival earned glowing reviews for the young star in February 2007. In a "full-circle" touch, Jenny Agutter, who played Strang's love interest Jill Mason in the movie, took the role of magistrate Hester Salomon in the London revival. Young fans packed the theater. And talked turned to a Broadway mounting as soon as Radcliffe's Harry Potter shooting schedule would allow.

Just before previews began at Broadway's Broadhurst Theatre on September 5, both Shaffer and Radcliffe addressed the worldwide brouhaha generated by Radcliffe's nude scene in the play never mind that he posed for a titillating series of shirtless publicity shots. "They're treating it like it's pornography, and it's not," he offered at a New York Times-sponsored event. "It's only seven minutes at the end of the play when I'm naked. And I'm 19 now."

Shaffer echoed that sentiment in less gracious terms. "There is a great deal more going on in the play, you know," he recently barked to the New York Post. "I'm not writing porn, for God's sake!" In any case, the Broadway production has reportedly amassed a $3 million advance, attracting audiences who wouldn't normally go to a play—much less a Peter Shaffer play—to a bold, provocative piece of theater.