Equus Performance Commentary. On paper, Peter Shaffers Equus is extraordinarily vivid piece of literature. Onstage, it is a visually engaging masterpiece

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On paper, Peter Shaffer’s Equus is extraordinarily vivid piece of literature. Onstage, it is a visually engaging masterpiece, where the complexity of breathing life into characters and settings by the perfected interplay between actors and the stage is an enthralling and emotional experience for all those involved. Like all theatric successes, Equus has endured various convoluted productions of the magnificent original, sometimes succeeding, and sometimes failing, to poke and prod the audience into thinking-questioning- imagining. A handful of directors have fallen prey to the vicious desire present within all of us: to turn a play into real life; to make it relatable to surroundings we are so familiar with. Those who do- fail; fail to understand the concepts that Equus strives to imbibe in its readers. Equus is not a pretty fairy tale dressed in the tattered rags of disillusionment, Equus is macabre and bare, miserly in its pity for a naïve audience that likes to think itself jaded.

In Shaffer’s words, “Upstage, forming a backdrop to the whole, are tiers of seats in the fashion of a dissecting theatre… [In these] sit the audience”. If one allows their imagination to roam as it will (and definitely as Shaffer wished it to be) the audience will form a rather imposing backdrop, hundreds of eyes that look down upon the tormented actors and silently, quietly, judge. Eyes are an important recurring motif in Equus: those of Equus, Alan’s jealous God, that perpetually watch Alan are emulated by the horse-actors and the audience that view the stage from above and the sides. Not only is the judging audience meant to be a sort of stand-in for God, but they also represent the masses; the forever judging, cruel, intransigent and sentient being that is society.

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The stage that the audience looks down is sparse, and movable. This allows the “square of wood set on a circle of wood” to be rotated, to mimic the various settings as needed: Alan’s house, the stable, Dysart’s office, and the field where Alan performs ecstatic and ritualistic worship. Shaffer describes the rail that surrounds the wooden square as “[resembling] a railed boxing ring”.  This boxing ring has been interpreted in many different ways, one critic compares Alan and Dysart as competitors of a sort, “the boxing ring [fits in with] the intimate contest in which psychiatrist and patient are ...

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