EQUUS

 

 

Equus by Peter Shaffer

Directed by Anne Somes. Associate director Crystal Mahon. Movement director Amy Campbell. Intimacy coordinator and stage manager Jill Young. Set design Cate Clelland. Lighting design Craig Muller. Sound design. Neville Pye. And Patrick Dixon. Live soundscape Crystal Mahon. Costume design. Anne Somes. Director of marketing Olivia Wenholz. Videography amd socialmedia Lachlan Elderton. Production Photography Janelle McMenamin, ACT HUB Season Photography = Ben Appleton – Photox.

Cast: Martin Dysart-Arran McKenna. Alan Strang: Jack Shanahan. Frank Strang/Harry Dalton: Bruce Hardie. Dora Strang: Janie Lawson.Hesther Salomon: Crystal Mahon. Jill Mason: Lily Welling. A Nurse: Caitlin Bissett. Nugget/Young horseman: Sam Thomson. Horses: Jamie Johnson. Finlay Forrest. Samara Glesti. Bianca Lawson. Robert Wearden.  Free Rain Tjheatre. ACT HUB. November 12-22.

Reviewed by Peter Wilkins

 

It is more than fifty years since I saw the original production of Peter Shaffer’s startling psychological drama Equus. Last night the memories flooded back as I watched Ann Somes’ remarkably deft production for Free Rain Theatre at ACT HUB. Somes’ production loses none of the theatrical power or intellectual enquiry of the original. The play has been staged as a minimalist investigation of action and motive with actors playing horses and the character actors seated Brechtian like at the rear of the stage awaiting the entrance of their character. ACT HUB’s intimate theatre space provides the ideal experience for total immersion in this gripping production.

Arran McKenna as Martin Dysart. Crystal Mahon as Hesther Salomon

 

 

 

Shaffer first heard of the case of a seventeen year old youth being charged for blinding six horses in a stable during a conversation in a pub. Curiosity ignited Shaffer’s imagination and enquiry.  The play focuses on the relationship between Alan Strang (Jack Shanahan) and the child psychiatrist Martin Dysart (Arran McKenna) who agreed to take on the case after being urged by magistrate Hesther Salomon (Crystal Mahon) to remove the young man’s pain. Throughout the process, Dysart is forced to confront his own existential dilemma and personal conflicts. If in the process he removes Strang’s pain, what is left of the young man’s obsession with and passion for horses? What does it mean to make him”normal”? What is lost and what price must Dysart pay in this great struggle to restore reason over individual instinct.?

Jack Shanahan as Alan. Arran McKenna as Dysart.

 In a series of short scenes Shaffer constructs an intriguing scenario. Circling the central relationship between the psychiatrist and his patient is Alan’s relationship with his highly religious mother, his atheist father, who bans his son from having television in the house, the horse Nugget (Sam Thomson) with whom he shares a bond of sacred devotion and Jill, whose innocent seduction of Alan provides the catalyst for an act of horrific consequence. We are left in this tightly directed production to observe and assess  the complexity of human emotion and intellect. The questions will remain long after one has left the theatre. The final image of Alan covered with a blanket that hides the cured result of Dysart’s shattering role play leaves us with the lingering question “Why me?, “Why him”

Sam Thomson as Nugget. Lily Welling as Jill Jack Shanahan asAlan

Somes has selected an outstanding cast. McKenna as Dysart inhabits the torment and self doubt of his practice. Alan is the scalpel that exposes his fpsychiatrist’s vulnerability and fear. Shanahan’s Strang is a coiled wire ready to fling open and snap. From ecstasy to excruciating emotional pain, Shanahan charts a challenging journey that leaves an audience riveted in the blinding scene and Dysart’s brutal exorcism.  Shanahan and Dysart are strongly supported by Mahon as the empathetic magistrate, Lawson as the mother,  Bruce Hardie as the father and Lily Welling as the innocent and natural girlfriend. No-one, not even Caitlin Bissett as the nurse remains untouched by the single act of brutal cruelty; not even the horses, and I am left after Free Rain’s thought provoking production asking myself, “What has changed since that first production.?”

Perhaps a deeper understanding of what it is to be human!