Thank you to Rina for suggesting that we read again this modern classic. It is gripping and absorbing, I am looking forward to getting to grips with it again.
And in 2017 it drove young Harry Potter fans to distraction when Daniel Radcliffe took on, and bared all, in the lead role ... (queue raciest picture to ever appear on this blog below!)
Equus is a 1973 play by Peter Shaffer, about a child psychiatrist who attempts to treat a young man who has a pathological religious fascination with horses.
Shaffer was inspired to write Equus when he heard of a crime involving a 17-year-old boy who blinded six horses in a small town in northern England. He set out to construct a fictional account of what might have caused the incident, without knowing any of the details of the crime, and to evoke the same "air of mystery" and "numinous" qualities as in his 1964 play The Royal Hunt of the Sun but in a more modern setting. The narrative of the play follows the attempts of Dr. Martin Dysart to understand the cause of the boy's (Alan Strang) actions while wrestling with his own sense of purpose and the nature of his work.
The original stage production ran at the National Theatre in London between 1973 and 1975.
