Peter Viney's Blog

By Peter Shaffer

Directed by Lindsey Posner
Set & costume by Paul Farnsworth
Choreographer James Cousins

Bath Theatre Royal co-production with the Menier Chocolate Factory

Bath Theatre Royal
Wednesday 15th July 2026, 14.30

CAST
Toby Stephens – Psychiatrist Martin Dysart
Noah Valentine – Alan Strang
Ed Mitchell – Nugget / horseman
Amanda Abbington – Hesther Saloman, other psychiatrist /magistrate
Bell Aubin – Jill, the stable girl
Emma Cunliffe – Alan’s mother
Paula James – nurse
Colin Mace – Alan’s father
David Rubin – Harry Dalton, stable owner

with
Luke Hodkinson
Aristide Lyons
Zach Parkin
Tommi Sutton
Moses Ward

The day didn’t start well for us. Three hours to get to Bath instead of 100 minutes because of multiple diversions and roadworks right in the summer tourist season. Then we get to the Theatre Royal and they DEMAND to put a sticker over my phone camera lens. I said no way are you putting sticky stuff on a lens. I said if you insist on doing it, refund my tickets. We’ll go. Then they said ‘it’s not mandatory.’ Isn’t ’you have to’ a statement that something is mandatory? They said it’s the company insisting not them. Hold on, it’s a BATH THEATRE ROYAL co-production. So they are “the company.” They have no right unless it was a condition for entry when you bought the ticket. I just said ‘no way’ and they let us in. My daughter says phone stickers are common at clubs in Ibiza, but it’s printed ion the ticket when you buy it. I’ve never seen one before, though Bob Dylan hands out the camera cases to lock your phone in which are then opened automatically as you leave. Stickers mess up lens. They’re also dumb. You can walk in, sit down and peel them off. Then I was holding my phone. They didn’t ask whether Karen had one. She did, in her bag. I suspect it was full frontal nudity that caused it though in Row C of the circle we’d have needed a long telephoto lens, not a phone camera. It reinforced our choice of Guildford for a play that’s on in both.

The classic 1973 play. I’d always wanted to see it. The emblazoned ‘FULL FRONTAL NUDITY’ was obligatory for a few years after Hair. We saw Abelard & Heloise in 1972 with just such a warning, and the two principals appeared on different sides, and hopped across on one leg, the other knee up to conceal their genitals. There was much laughter. We socialized with some of the female Hair cast when it was playing Bournemouth. They were telling us hilariously about the efforts the male cast …er, members … made to stand up straight on stage.

The very short outline is this. In 1970 / 71 Shaffer was travelling with a psychiatrist friend who told him about a boy who had blinded horses.

This led him to write the play, with the boy, Alan Strang (Noah Valentine) torn between a fundamentalist religious mother (Emma Cunliffe) and an atheist skinflick-addict dad (Colin Mace). Skinflick? A word I haven’t heard for years, when the “Continental” cinema in Winton, Bournemouth was known for the queues of men in macs outside.

A crucial incident is seeing a man on a horse on the beach who invited him up to ride. His dad intervened and pulled him off the horse. The implication is he thought the rider (Ed Mitchell) was up to no good. However the gallop on the horse was a transformative event for Alan.

So the lad became fixated both sexually and religiously on horses. “Equus” became both a religious icon and a sexual fantasy.

Then the stable girl, Jill (Bell Aubin) seduced him. The horses saw them, so he blinded the horses to cover his shame, part of which was being unable to perform.

In the play the action is ‘Hampshire’ and his fellow psychiatrist, who was a magistrate (Amanda Abbindon), saw the case against the boy in Winchester. She asked Martin Dysart (Toby Stephens) to take the boy’s case on. She’s sympathetic, the court crowd wanted him imprisoned for life.

Toby Stephens as Martin Dystart

Martin uses various techniques to try to get Alan to reveal his story, including hypnosis and a placebo masquerading as a ‘truth drug.’ Alan is a stunning performance by Noah Valentine as the traumatised, defiant, stubborn, angry, manipulative boy. Their interchange, especially when they take it turns to tell the truth, is a key part of the play. I had never read the text, but I had guessed early on that Martin would share some of the problems his patient has.

The staging is 1973 too, as the human cast members have to sit at the sides of the stage at all times. The set back is abstract grey blocks, and seats are mental backless benches, which also serve as beds.

The horses stay on stage for all of Act one. They are bare chested, but have no hooves or other accoutrements, but what they do is to move as horses quite spectacularly. In the original production they had hooves and heads. They get it by their movement here.

For long periods they sit absolutely frozen still. I could never do that. In Act 2 they’re not on all the time, because they become the men in dirty macs in the cinema scene. Then they’re horses again, and mainly on stage.

A crucial scene is Alan’s pre-teen encounter with the horse rider on the beach, when all six writhe together and interlock to form one horse. There is a great deal of carrying people involved. The principle horse, Nugget, has to carry the bollock-naked perpetrator, Alan Strang, on his neck. I wouldn’t think many rushed to volunteer for the role.

The story background and origin?

We started reading the programme note in the bar before we went in. Karen froze, ‘Do you remember something I told you in 1971 the first night we went out, about the boy and the horses?’ I did. In 1969, Karen then worked in the Psychiatric Unit in Boscombe, Bournemouth. Bournemouth was then in Hampshire, with psychiatry and probation under a head office in Winchester, It was moved into Dorset in the 1972 county boundary changes. There were two of them running the admin. I’ll add that when I called her at work to make our first date, she said, ‘Call me back in five minutes.’ I later learned that this was checking my name against the records in the psychiatric unit.

So the story. A boy was referred to them after feeding horses apples with razor blades in them. As in Shaffer’s play, the psychiatrist dealing with him in Bournemouth was the only one who used hypnosis. She remembered being terrified when the boy turned up at the unit in a long army greatcoat (he had long blond hair) in a howling gale. She said the aura of power, wickedness around him was tangible. He was sectioned, i.e. committed to a mental hospital legally. She added that none of the psychiatrists in 1969 had beards, nor wore soft brown corduroy jackets. Some wore full consultant pinstripe three piece, but all wore smart suits. She thought the psychiatrist costume here was an extreme sitcom cliché and also the wrong era. She also thought the interviews dramatically very good, but also unlikely. The horses choreography was the best thing in the play.

Shaffer insists it’s the story he was told. We think of two possibilities. First the apple and razor blade lad went on to do more evil after his release, or secondly, Shaffer is modestly hiding his own narrative creativity and that the Bournemouth case is the original. Hang on, or thirdly, there’s a lot more horse abuse about than we imagine.

It’s a fine production and somehow evokes a 1973 style.

It started its run at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London, and maybe got the fifth star in the intensity of that much smaller theatre. It was played there on a thrust stage rather than Bath’s proscenium in a much larger theatre (with poor acoustics).

****

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
Most review were the London production in May

5 star
Daily Mail *****
Broadway World *****
Theatre Weekly *****
The reviews Hub, *****

4 star
Domenic Cavendish, Telegraph, ****
Kste Wyver, The Guardian ****
Sarah Crompton, What’s On Stage ****

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

PETER SHAFFER
Equus by Peter Shaffer, Bath Theatre Royal 2026
Amadeus, National Theatre 2017
Amadeus  Chichester Festival Theatre, 2014
Black Comedy, Chichester 2014

LINDSEY POSNER
Endgame, Samuel Beckett, Bath Ustinov 2025
1984, Adapted by Ryan Craig, Bath 2024
A View From The Bridge, Theatre Royal Haymarket, 2024
The Deep Blue Sea, Bath Ustinov 2024
The Lover / The Collection by Harold Pinter, Bath Ustinov 2024
Farewell Mr Haffman By Jean-Philippe Gaguerre, Bath Ustinov 2023
God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza, Bath Theatre Royal 2018
The Lie by Florian Zeller, Menier Chocolate Factory, 2017
The Truth by Florian Zeller, Menier Chocolate Factory 2016
Communicating Doors by Alan Ayckbourn, Menier Chocolate Factory 2015
Dinner With Saddam by Anthony Horowitz, Menier Chocolate Factory 2015
The Hypochondriac by Moliere, adapted Richard Bean, Bath Theatre Royal, 2014 
A Little Hotel On The Side By Feydau, Bath Theatre Royal 2013
She Stoops To Conquer by Goldsmith, Bath Theatre Royal 2014
Hay Fever by Noel Coward, Bath Theatre Royal 2014
Abigail’s Party by Mike Leigh, Poole Lighthouse 2013

EMMA CUNLIFFE
Queen Anne, RSC 2015 (Queen Anne)