by Peter Shaffer
seen at the Menier Chocolate Factory on 20 June 2026
Lindsay Posner directs Toby Stephens as the psychiatrist Martin Dysart and Noah Valentine as the 17-year-old Alan Strang who has been referred to him after blinding six horses in the stables where he was working at weekends, in a revival of Peter Shaffer's 1973 play Equus. Emma Cunniffe and Colin Mace play Alan's parents Dora and Frank, Amanda Abbington plays Heather Saloman the referring magistrate, and Bella Aubin plays Jill Mason, Alan's co-worker at the stables.
The horses, traditionally portrayed with eerie head-dresses and metal hooves, are here represented by six black-trousered bare-footed dancers, their torsos smeared with black body paint and their movements expertly choreographed by James Cousins to indicate equine presence. Yet Ed Mitchell as Nugget, the horse that attracts Alan's closest attention, invests a homoerotic frisson to their encounters, allowing us to appreciate more strongly the heady mixture of physical delight and religious fervour in Alan's private world of devotion, matched by his wild incantations and eventually uninhibited re-enactments of his catastrophe.
What struck me most forcibly at the beginning of this revival, in contrast to earlier versions that I have seen, is how significant Dysart's crisis of confidence in his professional and personal life is to the structure of the play. This was largely due to the interpretation offered by Toby Stephens, impassioned and increasingly desperate as he wrestles with his doubts and occasionally succumbs to Alan's wily manipulations. Though the play begins as if narrated by Dysart in retrospect, by the end it is hard to know whether his despairing acknowledgement that he may have destroyed the boy's spiritual life by his therapy work is addressed directly to the sleeping Alan, or is just the culmination of his recollected narrative.
In all this Toby Stephens, giving a superb performance, is matched by an equally assured and powerful performance by Noah Valentine, veering from the nervy twitching and restlessness of the newly convicted teenager, to the excitement of the young boy's first encounter with a horse (recollected in an early therapy session) and then reaching an impassioned climax as he re-enacts the rites of his worship of "Equus" as embodied in the adored horse Nugget. At the same time, once Alan unbends enough to engage with Dysart, he soon learns to play the psychiatrist's games and has no compunction in exploiting his position to needle and infuriate the supposed adult in the room. It's a brilliantly nuanced performance by the young actor.
The conclusion to the first half of the play is an ecstatic evocation of the boy's fervour which seems impossible to match in the second act, but, amazingly, the final session in which Alan finally acknowledges what he has done (he had apparently remained silent during the court case that led to his referral) explodes in even more power as the full extent of his tortured confusion between sexual awakening and ritualised reverence for his equine god leads to the blinding. This is all enacted with fearless passion in which the distress of the horses is entangled with the frenzy of the boy in a blur of flashing lights and throbbing hoofbeats (lighting by Paul Pyant and sound by Adam Cork).
The intensity of the play is further enhanced by the intimacy of the theatre, much smaller than the other theatres in which I have seen productions. The celebrated 2007 revival with Daniel Radcliffe as Alan was in a conventional West End auditorium, inherently more distancing for all but the closest members of the audience, and, fine though it was, it suffered inevitably from its celebrity-related baggage, and perhaps a too-cerebral interpretation of Dysart by Richard Griffiths. The revival I saw in the Yvonne Arnaud theatre seven years ago (also very well done) was nowhere near as intense an experience as watching it in the small space offered by the Menier. (See also my review of 9th May 2019).
It's intriguing that Shaffer returned again and again to the framing device of a story recollected: the page boy Martin as a grizzled older man telling the story of the conquest of Peru in The Royal Hunt of the Sun; Dysart narrating a case history which shattered his life in Equus; the aged Salieri recalling the crushing impact of Mozart on his career in Amadeus. And he is also really interested in the dynamic of the irruption of a younger man of enigmatic quality in the life of an older man who is otherwise world-weary: the young god-king Atahualpa confronting the aged Pizarro; a deeply troubled teenager confounding a professional expert; a musical genius out-stripping a humdrum composer. In this production of Equus we see the confrontation at its most raw, and it is both a wonderful and a disturbing theatrical experience, enhanced here by two excellent leads, an assured supporting cast, and evocative choreography and staging.
