Equus

Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork

It can be difficult to understand

Equus

, a play which demands significant audience concentration on the task of linking several strands together.

This London Classic Theatre production of Peter Shaffer’s exploration of the psychiatry of adolescent violence and its toll on those trying to heal its damaged perpetrators seems to end with the whimper that a boy’s hideous assault on a group of horses was provoked because they witnessed his unsuccessful tumble in, as it happens, their hay. But this is more a symptom than a diagnosis and seems inadequate to a script which connects the Book of Revelations, the towers of Ilium and the insights of recent psychology.

However creaky the plot is by now this presentation achieves its explicit drama, helped by Kerry Bradley’s design and the lighting by Paul Green; the characterisations, especially from Matthew Pattimore as the bewildered and angry criminal Alan Strang, are convincing and the audience was rapt throughout this performance, despite the conversational exchanges delivered in tones which suggest that director Michael Cabot forgot to tell the cast that words need to be understood as well as said.

But as the play progresses the style reflects the normality to which psychiatrist Martin Dysart (Malcolm James) is trying to return, or condemn, his reluctant patient. The psychological core of the piece, daunting and divisive at the time of its first appearance in 1973, lies in the tension between the patient’s obduracy and the doctor’s attempts to uncover the possibly parental conflicts of religion and ideology which contributed to the outrage.

Alan relives his obsession with horses as if searching for a god to make life and sex comprehensible, while Dysart admits that his interest in ancient Greece fuels dreams in which he officiates at the evisceration of sacrificial children. He dreams; Alan acts, and healing implies the death of passion.

Although in thrall to RD Laing, Shaffer is typically capable of poetry, but should have remembered Browning: “Still we must lead some life beyond / Have a bliss to die with, dim-descried. . . No, Heaven and she are beyond this ride.”

Until Saturday