Angela C. Pao's "Equine Voyeurs"

Department of Theatre & Drama: Season 2000-2001
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Equine Voyeurs: Myth, Psychoanalysis and Consumer Culture in Equus
by Angela C. Pao

On 5 October 2000 Angela C. Pao, director of undergraduate studies and associate professor in Indiana University's Department of Comparative Literature, initiated the 2000-2001 series of pre-show talks about plays produced on the University Theatre stage. Dr. Pao teaches courses on drama, performance, contemporary critical theory, cross-cultural realtions and representations, and popular culture. She received a M.A. in theatre from Smith College and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California. She previously taught in the Department of English and the Department of Theatre and Dance at George Washington University. Her publications include The Orient of Boulevards: Exotism, Empire and 19th-century French Theatre and articles on David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly and the Miss Saigon casting controversy. She has been awarded an NEH Fellowship for 2000-2001 to work on her second book, an investigation of non-traditional casting in relation to theories of cultural identity.

Equus

These verses from the book of Job describe the majesty and mystery of the creatures that fascinate Alan Strang, the 17-year-old protagonist of Peter Shaffer's play. When the play opens, this young man's case is being presented to a psychiatrist, Martin Dysart. We learn only the bare facts: one night, at a stable in Winchester, he blinded six horses with a metal spike. At his trial, he refused to speak in his own defense, and would only recite commercial advertising jingles.

He also uses this tactic to block Dysart's inquiries when he feels the psychiatrist is hitting to close to home. We gradually learn that long before the night of the mutilation, these animals played such a central part in Alan's life - in fact, all the key moments in his development were marked by encounters with horses:

      True to his reputation as an eminent child psychiatrist, Dysart very quickly realizes that the horses provide the key to understanding his patient and "taking away his pain" (72). He learns that during Alan's secret midnight rides, ordinary horses with names like Nugget are transformed into deities, whom Alan worships according to a ritual of his own devising. The first object of worship was an icon - the portrait of the white horse in Alan's bedroom. As his father discovered one night, the early ritual involved the recitation of the equine god's lineage in a parody of the biblical "begats", the placing of a bridle-like string in his mouth, and self-flagellation with a coat-hanger. At the high point of the ceremony, the boy raised his hands up in glory and declared, "Behold-I give you Equus, my only begotten son." When Alan grows older, he expands this ritual, substituting live horses for the iconic representation, and adding glorious orgiastic and orgasmic rides over the fields as the final stage of the ritual.
      As a deity, Equus represents a composite of Christian theology, Greek mythology, and pagan ritual, both old world and new. He clearly possesses the paradoxical nature of the Christ figure whose image he replaced. Like Jesus, Equus "is in chains for the sins of the world and he lives in all horses" (Klein 104). In exchange for taking him out of his chains, "Equus promises Alan salvation by making the two of them into one: horse and rider shall be one beast" (Klein 104). Just as Christ accepted humiliation and crucifixion, curbing the power that could destroy his persecutors, Equus is willing to be a "Godslave" (64), submitting his strength and power, so vividly described in the book of Job, to human control—to the bridle and the bit—in order to defeat the enemy.
      Alan's ritual and his ideas about horses also draw heavily on the book of Revelation. Revelation 9:17 describes "the heads of horses [which] were as the heads of lions," with fire and smoke and brimstone issuing out of their mouths" —and verse 19 speaks of the "power of the horses [that] is in their mouth"; in chapter 6, the verses describing the four horsemen of the apocalypse atrribute the power of speech to the horse. Finally, Alan quotes the lines from Revelation 19:11-12 which describe the horses' eyes: "And I saw the heaven opened; and behold, a white horse, and he that sat thereon called Faithful and True.And his eyes are a flame of fireand he hath a name written which none knoweth but he himself" (Klein 113),
       The persona of Equus also bears the strong influence of Greek mythology, in which horses were considered to be of divine origin, issuing from the union of Poseidon and Demeter. The horse was Poseidon's proposed gift to the citizens of what would become one of the most important city-states of ancient Greece, although that gift was of course rejected in favor of Athena's olive tree. (The horses instead were released to run in the land of Colonus and are mentioned in Sophocles' last play, Oedipus at Colonus.) Alan's first memorable encounter is with a horse named Trojan, recalling Book Eight of Homer's Odyssey, and Trojan speaks to him much like Achilles' immortal horse Xanthos, who prophesied the Greek hero's death. As one classical scholar, Richard Lewinsohn, has written: "In Homer's verse and thereafter the horse was an adjunct of the great heroes of ancient Greece, the greatest warriors rode on wonder beasts given to them by the gods. Most of these horses had wings, and many were able to talk" (qtd in Klein 113).
      But it was not Shaffer's intention to simply create a composite deity. Far from being just a specific figure to be worshipped, Equus, in Shaffer's words is "the name one individual gives to his impulse for worship." (Vogue, File 49) It is this impulse itself, in all its primitive powerful and mystical glory, that Shaffer sees being systematically repressed and destroyed in the modern world. The enemies of this incarnation of the god Equus are identified in Alan's ritual incantations: they are "The Hosts of Hoover. The Hosts of Philco. The House of Remington and all it tribe!" They are "The Hosts of Bowler. The Hosts of Jodhpur" (64). These unlikely minions dominate Alan's "rather dreary and colourless provincial life" which according to Shaffer, consists of "working with not much to look forward to in an electrical and kitchenware shop, with an unimaginative but kindly father and an unimaginative but kindly mother (who are much the same although one happens to believe in God and one does not)" (Vogue, File 49).
       Hoover, Philco and Remington are not just the brand names of the appliances Alan must try and sell in a meaningless job; they represent a world where energy is measured in watts and amperes in the service of domestic convenience, in contrast to the raw energy of the horses of the Old Testament and classical mythology. This is the world of his father, Frank, who rejects religion and television as equally harmful drugs in their appeal to the imagination, and who, to all appearances at least, seems to be concerned with only the practical aspects of everyday life.
      The hosts of Bowler and Jodhpur, represent the tidy and proper constraints of "equitation," which curb the strength of the horse, not in the name of truth or righteousness, but for the purpose of empty and vain displays of human skill at horse shows or on recreational jaunts. This is the world of his mother, Dora, who comes from a "horsy family." As she tells Dysart, "My grandfather used to ride every morning on the downs behind Brighton, all dressed up in bowler hat and jodhpurs! He used to look splendid. Indulging in equitation he called it" (23).
       The world of equitation consists of a one-sided demonstration of the rider's ability to control his horse. In Alan's world, horse and rider must become one—like a centaur or the mounted conquistadors who were initially taken for gods by the Incas. This union is at the same time religious (like the Christian union of god and man) and sexual; and for Shaffer it was important that the two be considered inseparable. He was fascinated by the historical interrelations of sex and religion, and the awe of early religions before the mysteries of fertility and reproduction, which often made sex a central part of their rituals. In the view of one critic, Shaffer's intention is to use sex as a passion with which his audience can readily identify, and to seek an even more transcendent, more intense, and more meaningful passion in religion (Stacy 105).
       These were themes Shaffer first explored in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, written about 10 years before Equus. This play was set in what is now part of Peru and Ecuador, from 1529 to 1533—the age when Spanish conquistadors first crossed the borders of the Incan empire. In his introduction to the published play, Shaffer answered his own questions: "Why did I write The Royal Hunt? To make colour? Yes. To make magic? Yes" (4). He wanted to reverse what he saw as a disturbing trend in Western civilization. In his view, "what is most distressing in reading history is the way man constantly trivialises the immensity of his experience; the way, for example, he canalises the greatness of his spiritual awareness into the second-rate formula of a church—any church: how he settles for a Church or Shrine or Synagogue, how he demands a voice, a law, an oracle, and over and over again puts in the hands of other men the reins of repression and the whip of Sole Interpretation" (4-5). To him "Churches and flags, armies and parties," represent the "neurotic allegiances of Europe"—they are the villains of The Royal Hunt of the Sun. The "hero" of this play is at best a problematical figure. While Shaffer would have liked to draw a "free man surging ahead under his own power"—he cannot. As he recognized, "Life is not that uncomplicated. The explorer Pizarro, who comes the closest to filling the role of hero, is" like all men, entangled in his birth. He too is without joy. In his negation, he is as anti-life as the bitter Church and the rigid Sun are in their affirmations. He denounces falsehoods and hypocrisy, but the denial of falsehood is not enough. In Shaffer's opinion, "Too often to remove a dyke is merely to let in the flood-tide of meaninglessness, which can destroy the essential joy in man" (5).
       In Equus, through the intermediary of the mythical horse, Alan Strang succeeded in recapturing his own joy and a sense of meaning that Shaffer sees as having abandoned the Western world. Against all odds, "Surrounded by four- and six-lane highways going to the guts of cities, and surrounded by concrete eggboxes and the dreary paraphernalia of modern life" he had found a way to reach a state of transcendent ecstasy. (Vogue, File 49) He is able to feel both genuine passion and pain. Unfortunately, however, in the process of accessing the elemental and the ecstatic, Alan has gone beyond the boundaries of socially acceptable behavior and Martin Dysart, sharing Pizarro's dilemma and acting as the representative of social norms, has no choice but to excise this part of Alan's existence and banish Equus from his mind. But this is not done without deep regrets. Describing his own achievement, Dysart proclaims:

He'll be delivered from madness. What then? He'll feel himself socially acceptable! What then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply re-attached like band-aids? My desire might be to make this boy an ardent husband-a caring citizen-a worshipper of an abstract and unifying God. My achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost!Let me tell you exactly what I'm going to do to him! I'll heal the rash on his body. I'll erase the welts cut into his mind by flying manes. When that's done, I'll set him on a metal scooter and send him puttering off into the concrete world, and, he'll never touch hide again! Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created. (98-99)       As is so often the case with dramas involving psychiatrists, it turns out that while the patient is the object of the psychiatrist's analysis, the psychiatrist is the primary object of the author's analysis. (In the recent film, this was the premise of Good Will Hunting.) It seems that Dysart is undergoing what he himself describes as "professional menopause" and is unable to free himself from his own nightmares. In a disturbing dream, he finds himself "a chief priest in Homeric Greece." He is wearing "a wide gold mask, all noble and bearded, like the so-called Mask of Agamemnon found at Mycenae" and holding a sharp knife. He realizes he is "officiating at some immensely important ritual sacrifice." The victims to be sacrificed are 500 boys and girls, stretching in a long queue across the plain of Argos. As each child comes forward, he slices the child open to the navel and neatly eviscerates him or her, as his assistants read the entrails. What he must hide from them is the overwhelming nausea he feels as he dissects the children placed in his hands. This occurs in Act I, scene 5 (14-15).
       In the middle of the play, as Act II opens, he finds that when he shines his "dim torch" into the "black cave of the Psyche" (66), he is confronted by a mocking Equus who asks, "Do you really imagine you can account for Me? Totally, infallibly, inevitably account for Me? Poor Doctor Dysart!" That "ME" is the unique individuality of each human being. As Dysart realizes: "A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs—it sucks—it strokes its eyes over the whole uncountable range. Suddenly one strikes. Why? Moments snap together like magnets, forging a chain of shackles. Why? I can trace them. I can even, with time, pull them apart again. But why at the start they were ever magnetized at all-just those particular moments of experience and no others-I don't know. And nor does anybody else" (67).
       The basic psychological issue in the play was originally presented in Dr. R.D. Laing's The Politics of Experience, published in 1967, just 6 years before Equus was first produced. In this work, Laing debates who should and should not be cured of individualizing personality traits. He questions the "value and justice of curing many of those individuals society considers insane." It is his belief that "a person is born into a world where alienation awaits . . ., and that the diseases psychiatrists purport to cure are in fact perpetuated when an individual is regarded as an 'object-to-be changed' rather than a 'person-to-be-accepted.'" He further believes that more attention should be paid to the experience of the patient, and that those experiences should not automatically be considered invalid or unreal. Laing also objects to the "denigration and dehumanization the patient suffers in being subjected to the process of psychiatric examination, diagnosis and treatment" (qtd in Klein 112). As Dennis Klein points out, these themes have been treated in Anthony Burgess's novel and Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange, which "questions the right of society to cure patients by removing from their personalities the antisocial traits that make them unique" (112).
       Shaffer poeticizes Laing's voice when he has Dysart say: "The Normal is the good smile in a child's eyes[but] it is also the dead stare in a million adults . . .. It is the Ordinary made beautiful: it is also the Average made lethal. The Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health, and I am his priestI have honestly assisted children in this room. I have talked away terrors and relieved many agonies. But also-beyond question-I have cut from them parts of individuality repugnant to this god" (56).
       Shaffer was especially drawn to the theories of Carl Jung, whom he called "the poet of psychiatry." (Vogue, File 50) His conception of Alan's ability to truly feel was influenced by Jung's characterization of "neurosis as an escape from legitimate pain" (Vogue, File 49). In an interview, he remarked, "Until I read that, I hadn't quite been aware that there was such a thing as legitimate pain. I think Jung is one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, [because] Jung is so intensely grounded in myth." Shaffer continues: "Most people do not realize—and by 'realize' I mean they do not feel intensely, from day to day, in any way that truly affects them—that we did not begin the world, that we are repositories, walking encyclopedias, of all human experience, that we contain within us, within our heads and without our genes, the whole of human history. The more one comes to realize that the cells of one's brain contain endless archetypal images that stretch back beyond the Stone Age, the more one can come to an immense and important sense of who one is, for himself, instead of just a little worried package of responses and reflexes, sexual drives and frustrations" (Vogue, File 49-50).
       Dysart's doubts also reflect Jung's theory that the more complicated and sophisticated we become, the more we lose the ability to act upon instincts. In his efforts to re-establish contact with his own passions and instincts, Dysart also turns to what he calls "the vast intuitive culture" of the ancient Greeks. In the evenings, he withdraws to a world of Doric temples with clouds tearing through their pillars, eagles bearing prophecies out of the sky, and sacred Cretan acrobats who leap through the horns of running bulls. His dream is to be able to travel to Greece with "one instinctive person" who will understand when he stands before a shrine or sacred stream and declares: "Look! Life is only comprehensible through a thousand local gods. And not just the old dead ones with names like Zeus-no, but living Geniuses of Place and Person! And not just Greece but modern England!" The gods he speaks of may be the "spirits of certain trees, certain curves of brick wall, even certain fish and chip shops or slate roofs." The important thing is that people should "Worship as many as they can see-because then more will appear." The worst thing that he can imagine, is that a person should be "worshipless" (Scene 18, 53-55). And unfortunately, just as Alan was born to "worshipless" parents of little imagination, Dysart is married to a wife of even less imagination—a dentist—whose response to a story from the Iliad is: "You know when you come to think of it, Agamemnon and that lot were nothing but a bunch of ruffians from Glasgow, only with fancy names" (53). Although the Dysarts actually go to Greece every year for their vacation, these trips are well planned, booked-in-advance excursions, hardly the vital contact with the primitive that Martin envisions in the comfort of his living room.
       Dysart's profound envy of Alan's ability to worship primitively and passionately, is the source of the play's tragic conflict. Shaffer has commented that "Tragedy obviously does not lie in a conflict of Right and Wrong, but in a collision between two different kinds of Right: in this casebetween Dysart's professional obligation to treat a terrified boy who has committed a dreadful crime, and Alan's passionate capacity for worshipDysart has to do what he does.Yet in proceeding by his best and honourable lights, the doctor cannot but know that he is in some clear sense the destroyer of a passion he must forever, and rightly, envy" (Personal Essay, File 51).
       What I have talked about so far, reflects Peter Shaffer's intentions and his own analysis of the themes and characters of Equus. As is so often the case, critical reactions and interpretations of the play often disagreed with or exceeded the playwright's intentions. Interestingly, there was a noticeable divide between reactions on the two sides of the Atlantic. As Shaffer summed it up, "in England the play was found shocking because it seemed cruel to horses, in America because it seemed cruel to psychiatrists." (Dramatists Guild, File 50) The main point on which both British and American critics disagreed was whether or not the play had genuine intellectual merit. Reactions were bipolar, with some critics proclaiming it "sensationally good" and a "powerfully moving," staging of the "confrontation between reason and instinct." Others, however, considered it "trite social drama" and "pretentious philosophical claptrap."
       A particularly acerbic condemnation of the play came from John Simon (as one might expect) who was writing for New York Magazine. In his opinion,

Equus

File

      Re-reviewing the play after a cast change in Spring 1975, Simon found nothing to improve his opinion. To his previous remarks, he added the comment that the play "pullulates with dishonesty," and took it upon himself to insult the audience as well as the playwright. He stated that Equus pampers its "affluent, bourgeois, conformist" audiences members by allowing them to affirm their libertarianism and unconventionality in a very safe manner" ("Hippodrama," Thomas 152).
       The critics also discovered themes that have not been stressed by Shaffer in his own comments on the play. Many phrased the central dichotomy in terms of a Nietschean opposition of the Apollonian (the genius of measure, restraint and harmony expressed in 5th century BC architecture and sculpture) and the Dionysian - the intoxicating revels of the festival, celebrated in music and dance.
       Others found a disguised homosexual theme in Equus. One of the critics in this group, Marilyn Stasio of Cue Magazine believed that "the young patient's driving urge to worship horses becomes a dramatic metaphorical argument forthe glorification of homosexuality" (Thomas 153). The fact that Shaffer had been living with Peter Firth, the actor who played the part of Alan in London, New York and on film, was seen as adding support for this argument. In the text of the play, the precise circumstances of the blinding of the horses would also support this view as well as explain the title of this talk "Equine Voyeurs." But to tell what exactly the horses saw would reveal too much and spoil the play, so I won't be going into this.
       But whatever themes the critics drew out of Equus and whatever their opinions concerning its intellectual merit, there was one point on which everyone concurred: it was powerful and innovative theatre. It was not, however, Shaffer's technical mastery of the visual, auditory and material aspects of theatre in itself that was so important. For Walter Kerr, the New York Times theatre critic, the significance of the play lay in its total melding of form and theme. He said, "If there is one thing more than another that a contemporary playwright would like to do, it is to make a myth. We feel a desperate need these days for new icons, images, clothed symbols that will help us come to terms with the 'dark cave of the psyche', the cave that thousands of years of reasoning haven't quite lighted after all." For him, "The closest a contemporary play has cometo reanimating the spirit of mystery that makes the stage a place of breathless discovery, rather than a classroom for rational demonstration, is Peter Shaffer's remarkable Equus." (File 55)
       If Alan's creation of Equus the Godslave, and the psycho-sexual union of boy and horse could be considered a problematical solution to modern alienation, no such ambiguity has been attached to Shaffer's creation of Equus as a piece of theatre that recovered the mystery and ritual of ancient Greek performance, whether it be the Dionysian revels or classical tragedy. It is actually in one of Shaffer's more recent plays, also with a classically inspired title, The Gift of the Gorgon (1992), that the lasting impact of Equus is described:

The theatre [is] the only religion that can never die . . . at its height, centuries ago here in England just as much as Greece, the theatre gave us faith and True Astonishment - as religion is supposed to do. The playwright set up his play like Athena's shield: a great shining surface in which you can see all truth by reflection! The audience assembled before it, and peered into it together, in communion. They saw themselves enlarged-made legendary as well as particular, in all their glory and ghastliness. It faced them with towering shapes of their most intense and terrible desires. Undeniable pictures, formed of blazing words. They came away astounded. Scared. Exalted. Seeing themselves, perhaps for the first time, which they'd always thought ordinary-lit with the fire of transformation. (20-21) Works Cited
File on Shaffer. Compiled by Virginia Page and Malcolm Cook. London: Methuen, 1987.
Kerr, Walter. "A Psychiatric Detective Story of Infinite Skill." New York Times 2 Sept. 1973: section 2; 1, 3.
Klein, Dennis A. Peter Shaffer: Revised Edition. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993.
Shaffer, Peter. Equus. New York: Samuel French, 1973.
_____. "Equus:Playwright Peter Shaffer Interprets its Ritual," Vogue, Feb. 1975: 136,192.
_____. The Gift of the Gorgon. London: Penguin, 1993.
_____. "A Personal Essay," in Equus, ed. T.S. Pearse. Longman, 1983.
_____. The Royal Hunt of the Sun. New York: Samuel French, 1964.
_____. "Scripts in Trans-Atlantic Crossings May Suffer Two Kinds of Changes," Dramatists Guild Quarterly, Spring 1980: 29-33.
Simon, John. "The Blindness is Within." New York Magazine, 11 Nov. 1974: 118.
______. "Hippodrama at the Psychodrome." Hudson Review, Spring 1975: 970-106.
Stacy, James R. "The Sun and the Horse: Peter Shaffer's Search for Worship." In Peter Shaffer: A Casebook, ed. C.J. Gianakaris, New York: Garland Publishing, 1991
Stasio, Marilyn. Review of Equus. Cue 4 Nov. 1974: 23.
Thomas, Eberle. Peter Shaffer: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing, 1991.

Angela C. Pao, Dept. of Comparative Literature, Indiana University