Equus is a play about a boy, Alan Strang, who blinds six horses with a hoof pick. Equus is a play about a psychiatrist, Martin Dysart, who must normalize the boy back into society. But Dysart discovers that his own pagan outlook is deficient next to Alan’s ecstatic experience as self created God-incarnate. Despite the horror of Alan’s cruelty, Dysart sees that Alan’s religious megalomania might be the correct path to a fruitful life. However, Dysart’s job is to push Alan back on the accepted path that society mandates. During the process, Dysart decides to retire from the path and reclaim something of his individual self lost in service to culture. Such is the dichotomy between the individual and society in Equus.
But this story of a boy, Alan, versus a society also runs congruent with the drama of the clash of paganism and Christianity. Much of the critical work on
Equus discusses Nietzsche’s Dionysian and Apollonian undercurrent. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche criticizes Euripides for preferring rational thinking over base human behavior when Euripides chooses “to separate this primitive and all-powerful Dionysian element from tragedy, and to build up a new and purified form of tragedy on the basis of a non-Dionysian art, morality, and conception of things” (Nietzsche 47). Most critical literary thinkers prefer this Greek myth dichotomy regarding Equus. Anna Despotopoulou’s article From Dionysus to Gorgon: Peter Shaffer’s Revision of Classical Myth and Theory is a typical response to the play and builds on Nietzsche’s work. But these theories ignore the obvious Christian references and the Christian and pagan battle.
Yet, The Greek myth framework is a useful point of departure in discussing Equus. The stage is literally set as a pagan altar. At the first point in the play, the stage is a polytheistic altar owned and operated by the psychiatrist-priest Dysart. There are no crosses. There are no Jesus figures. The stage is bare and receptive to ritual ceremony and blood sacrifice. Early in the play, Dysart in his dream is a “chief priest in Homeric Greece . . . wearing a wide gold mask, all noble and bearded” (Shaffer 17). At least in his mind, Dysart’s psychiatric office (the stage) is a place where “the sacrifice is a herd of children: about 500 boys and girls” (Shaffer 17). And into this stark domain, Dysart, in the opening lines of the play, manifests for our pleasure, Alan and the horse Nugget under a bright light. The bright light, like Bentham’s and Foucault’s scrutiny, press upon Alan to reveal the truth of himself. The stage is set.
The first line of “The Setting” describes the stage as containing “a square of wood set on a circle of wood” (Shaffer 3). This description is reminiscent of the idiom of forcing a square peg to fit into a round hole. Of course, if you chisel away at the square peg until the diagonal is less than the diameter, then the square peg will fit into the round hole. That might require losing a large amount of the character of the square peg. If Alan is the zealous square peg then the round hole is Dysart’s, and society’s, normalized conventions. Dysart must shape Alan to fit.
But Alan cannot easily be reduced. Instead, over the course of the play, Alan’s world overpowers Dysart’s altar. Little by little, as Dysart probes Alan’s psyche, Alan’s pseudo-Christian world consumes Dysart’s pagan arena.
Leonard Mustazza directly confronts the Greek myth structure of most critical thinkers: “The fact is that only a small part of Alan’s worship can be characterized as “Dionysian” (orgiastic and ecstatic). Instead, the vast majority of Alan’s “myth” is based upon Judeo-Christian theology and rite” (Mustazza 175). Nietzsche’s argument is valid as far as it goes. In tragedy, if Dionysus and Apollo are not equal enemies, the story is weak and uninteresting. However,
Equus is a powerful play because the clash of the Christian and the pagan is in addition to the fight between base desire and intellect. Once each character’s mask is dropped or torn away, then these conflicts are revealed to the audience.
Masks help individuals hide their basic instincts from society. If the individual can’t find an appropriate mask, then culture will fashion a mask for them. In
Equus, the only person not wearing a mask is Alan. Alan’s parents, Frank and Dora, hide behind the masks of Christianity and atheism or the roles of husband and wife. Dysart’s masks are psychiatry and a boring marriage. Dysart’s job is to fashion Alan’s mask and to reintroduce the masked boy into the masque of society. Even the horse actors wear masks, but theirs is of a different nature. In the description of “The Horses” at the beginning of the play, Shaffer writes about the horse masks, “The actors’ own heads are seen beneath them: no attempt should be made to conceal them” (Shaffer 5). It is alright, within the play, for the horse/human to exist. Alan desires to become one with the horse god. His rituals and ceremonies help him to reveal his human nature and celebrate his horse nature.
No matter the religious nature, whether Christian or pagan, ceremonies and rituals provide a liminal state between the mundane and the spiritual. Alan used ritual and self flogging to transcend the everyday. Dysart used the ritual of psychiatry to help patients explore their feelings, but the ritual never allowed Dysart to transcend his everyday life.
In Dysart’s psychiatric world, one useful liminal state is dreams. If we are condemned for our actions in our dreams, then all of us are guilty of transgressions. Dreams redirect the pressures of life so that each of us will not act out our often violent, sexually deviant and anarchic fantasies. Dysart doesn’t act on his dream of sacrificing boys and girls. He sees the dream as an indicator of his subconscious feelings about his job as a psychiatrist.
But Alan isn’t dreaming. He is experiencing. His thoughts manifest in real time action. Once Dysart understands this, he questions his own dreams and his own reality. “Dysart . . .once in touch with the boy’s authentic spirituality, comes face to face with his own artificial existence and envies the creativity that the boy’s worship stimulates” (Despotopoulou 86).
Finally, Dysart can fully appreciate the mystical experience of Alan. At the beginning of the play, when Dysart is looking back in retrospect during his first monologue, he uses words like “sweaty,” “nudging,” “kissing,” “embraces,” to describe the manner of Alan and the horse Nugget. In awe and respect, Dysart won’t name the boy, but calls him “he.” Dysart says of himself that he (himself) is “all reined up in old language and old assumptions . . . because my educated, average head is being held at the wrong angle” (Shaffer 10).
The languageused by Dysart and by Alan describe an ecstatic experience. In scenes 20 and 21 of Act one (Shaffer 65-72), Alan describes how he sheds his clothes to ride the horses. He places a stick in his mouth that he calls the “Manbit” and hides the stick in the “Ark of the Manbit.” He gives the horse a lump of sugar as “His Last Supper.” Alan calls the horse “Equus the Godslave.” Finally, in an ecstatic trance, Alan chants over and over, “Ha, ha, ha, ha.” This language is reminiscent of St. Teresa of Avila’s description of her own religious experience. “These sublime favours leave the soul so desirous of fully enjoying Him Who has bestowed them, that life becomes a painful, though delicious torture, and death is ardently longed for” (St. Teresa 128). “Equus embodies Alan’s religious and sexual desire as well as his religious and sexual frustration. He blinds the horses in an enraged and pathetic attempt to avert the accusing eye of Equus, his true lover and God” (Quigley 22). Alan’s ecstasy I s“agape love” or that sentiment of joy in the ecstasy of communion and union with the divine that manifest as a physical sexual experience but carries none of the base connotations of human intercourse. The Virgin Mary’s experience with the Holy Spirit and the resulting birth of Jesus represent the apex of the agape experience.
How is the audience meant to react to the play? Certainly the blinding of the horses is atrocious, but the total consumption by God of the devotee is an experience wished for by many religious zealots of different religions. They are indeed called zealots because their actions seem abnormal and incomprehensible. Dysart recognizes this fact and at the same time comprehends the banality of his own life. Sigmund Freud’s friend and confidant, C. G. Jung, wrote, “I . . . shall content myself with the fact that a natural function which has existed from the beginning, like the religious function, cannot be disposed of with rationalistic and so-called enlightened criticism” (Jung 38).
