Sidney Lumet (1977)

Although I’m not a Peter Shaffer fan, his play Equus delivered one of my most exciting and memorable evenings in the theatre.  There were several reasons for that – Michael Jayston in the lead role, John Dexter’s direction, John Napier’s design.  This was the original production of Equus, first staged at the National Theatre in 1973 but which had transferred to the West End when I saw it at the Albery Theatre in November 1976.  My recollection of a stark, cold set may well be coloured – monochromed – by the black-and-white cover of the theatre programme (which I’ve kept), and by the production’s sustained tension.  Jayston became the third actor to play the Equus protagonist, psychiatrist Martin Dysart, in London, after Alec McCowen and Colin Blakely.  The play was also successfully staged on Broadway, running for almost three years from late 1974.  When it closed in New York – in October 1977, days before the release of Sidney Lumet’s film in both Britain and the US – there’d been no less than four new Broadway Dysarts, including Anthony Hopkins, Anthony Perkins and Leonard Nimoy.  The fourth was Richard Burton, who also stars in the film.

Between 1964 and 1978 inclusive, prolific Sidney Lumet released at least one feature film each year, but bringing Equus to the screen, according to Wikipedia, was no rush job:  Lumet had been keen to direct the film after seeing the play on both sides of the Atlantic; he and Peter Shaffer ‘spent more than one year preparing the screenplay before filming began’.  The fundamental problem with their adaptation (never mind that Shaffer received the sole screenplay credit) is Lumet’s unwillingness either to lose the play’s words or to waste the opportunity of making Equus more ‘cinematic’, by shooting outdoor sequences and so on.  (Lumet did resist the temptation to open out Eugene O’Neill’s text for the film of Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962) – the result an artistic success and a commercial failure.)  In Equus, Lumet repeatedly reconstructs on screen events that a character’s voiceover is describing simultaneously – a tautology that makes for the worst of both worlds.  Even as images are reduced to visual aids, voiceover is rendered largely superfluous.

The film’s first few minutes give a good idea of what will go wrong during the next two hours or so.  Accompanied by Richard Rodney Bennett’s discreetly ominous and melancholy music, the screen shows a ceremonial dagger.  The camera travels up, and closes in on, the dagger’s handle, which represents an equine skull, shown in sideview.  (The image calls to mind a memorable element of the original stage version, which featured a chorus of human actors wearing horse-head masks.)  The skeleton horse’s eye-socket is empty; a large red jewel in the nostril suggests blood.  This stylised skull morphs into the head of a living white horse, its bridle replicating the chains on the dagger handle.  The white horse stands in darkness, cheek by jowl with a naked youth whose head is obscured from view by the horse’s.  A voice – unmistakably Richard Burton’s – likens them to ‘a necking couple’; the boy rather than the horse is doing the nuzzling.  This image, like that of the preceding dagger, is very striking but, unlike the dagger, rather silly too.  The obviously real horse, nearly but not quite motionless, somehow gives the impression of putting up with what the filmmakers have asked it to do.

The camera moves slowly sideways into dark woodland as Burton’s voice asks:

‘Is it possible, at moments we can’t imagine, a horse can add its sufferings together – the non-stop jerks and jabs that are its daily life – and turn them into grief?  What use is grief to a horse?’

As his face appears for the first time, in close-up, Burton’s Martin Dysart explains, ‘You see, I’m lost’.  This would be a visually and verbally fancy introduction even if Lumet had ended it there, but Dr Dysart has plenty more to say:

‘What use, I should be asking, are questions like these to an overworked psychiatrist in a provincial hospital?  They’re worse than useless.  They are, in fact, subversive.  The thing is, I’m wearing that horse’s head myself, all reined up in old language and old assumptions, straining to jump clean-hoofed onto a new track of being I only suspect is there.  I can’t see it, because my educated, average head is being held at the wrong angle.  I can’t jump, because the bit forbids it, and my own basic force.  My horsepower, if you like, is too little …’

This opening speech in the film is one long spoiler.

It’s the opening speech in the play, too, but the effect is – or was, in the stage Equus that I saw – different, and not just because Dysart in the theatre isn’t competing with images of an actual, restrained horse.  The actor playing the psychiatrist can keep something up his sleeve by giving the words a dry, pedantic edge.  Such a reading will prove to make complete sense – a verbal flight of fancy is Dysart’s only way of soaring – but doesn’t give the game away immediately.  Richard Burton’s screen presence doesn’t, of course, naturally suggest a spiritually or sensually desiccated man, but he created one superbly in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), so it’s not simply a matter of his being miscast as Dysart.  Here, though, Burton’s haggard face and infinitely world-weary voice prematurely reveal his whole characterisation, as well as Shaffer’s central idea.  Over the course of Equus, Dysart has eight substantial speeches addressed direct to the audience.  In the theatre, these soliloquies, as quite a familiar stage device, seem natural enough; on screen, they’re artificial.  It’s not as if Dysart switches from analyst to analysand in the film monologues; the audience must listen, but we’re hearing a sermon as much as a confession.  The speeches smack of Lumet’s wanting to showcase his star – and, since Burton kicks off at a vocally intense level, there’s little scope for development.

The youth in that opening nighttime idyll with the horse is seventeen-year-old Alan Strang (Peter Firth).  He has a job in an electrical supplies shop during the week; at weekends, he works at local stables.  One Saturday night, he uses a metal spike (a hoof pick) to blind six horses there.  In a magistrates’ court, JP Hesther Saloman (Eileen Atkins) persuades her colleagues on the bench not to impose a prison sentence but to place Alan on remand, pending a psychiatric report.  Hesther is a friend of Dysart’s. She comes to the mental hospital where he works to ask him to take on Alan as a patient.  At first, Alan won’t speak, except to recite jingles from television adverts, but his parents, whom Dysart visits at their home, are more revealing.  Dora Strang (Joan Plowright) is a Christian fanatic; the boy Alan absorbed biblical language and imagery as mother’s milk.  Dora’s husband Frank (Colin Blakely), who runs his own printing business, is decidedly anti-religious.  Dora tells Dysart how her son has always loved and been drawn to horses – as a child he was fascinated by the word equus because he’d ‘never come across one with two U’s together before’.  It’s soon clear that Alan has replaced his mother’s God with his fantasy of a horse god – Equus.  Even though he still doesn’t trust Dysart, Alan begins to open up to him about his regular secret outings from the stables with the white horse, culminating in their after-dark communion.

This isn’t the only instance of Alan’s extraordinarily physical worship of Equus.  Frank Strang tells Dysart about the time he looked through the open door of his son’s room to see Alan wearing a halter and whipping himself to orgasm.  Detective Dysart also talks with the stables owner (Harry Andrews), who mentions Alan’s friendship with Jill Mason (Jenny Agutter).  She also worked weekends at the stables but suffered a nervous breakdown in response to Alan’s attack on the horses.  It emerges that, on that fateful evening, Jill and Alan went out together for the first time – to watch, at her jokey insistence, a crummy porn film.  Back at the stables after the cinema, Alan and Jill, also for the first time, literally had a roll in the hay.  Or started to – Alan couldn’t go through with it:  his god got in the way.  His mother drilled into the child Alan that God saw everything.  Equus does, too.  The all-seeing horse deity is all that Alan can see when he tries to have sex with a woman.  His solution is to blind the horses looking on from their stalls.

After two or three of the monologues, as delivered by Richard Burton, you wish Dysart would give it a rest:  we’ve already got Shaffer’s message, although it takes the psychiatrist longer to work things out.  Nevertheless, and despite the welter of words, Shaffer puts some intriguing details into Equus and manipulates them cleverly.  Alan’s fascination with the spelling of equus is of a piece with his preferred choice of TV commercial jingle, ‘Double your pleasure, double your fun, with double-good, double-good, Doublemint gum!’, with his bedroom antics, with what his mother tells Dysart about Christian cavalry in the New World – ‘Did you know that … the pagans thought that horse and rider was one person … they thought it must be a god’.  Alan’s desire to become one with Equus also carries echoes of Christianity’s conjugal relationship between the Church as ‘the bride of Christ’ and ‘Jesus Christ her Lord’.  Shaffer’s choice of surname for his main character is very expressive.  As we learn from one of his exchanges with Hesther, Martin Dysart the child psychiatrist has no children of his own.  He’s in a passionless marriage to a Scottish dentist:  at one point, he refers to his wife (who’s never seen) and himself as ‘Dr and Dr McBrisk’.  Speaking the two syllables of his real name aptly connotes dissection, playing dice, even cutting into a heart.

Dysart is increasingly tormented by what he sees as a dilemma.  Is it reasonable, in view of his own arid, agnostic existence, to use his doctor’s skills to deprive Alan Strang of the bizarrely passionate side of his life?  Theatrically seductive as the idea may be, it doesn’t convince.  This crisis of professional faith and conscience isn’t much of a doctor’s dilemma, given the patient’s violently aberrant behaviour and that, as Hesther also points out to Dysart, Alan’s ‘in pain … and you can take it away’.  While it’s not clear quite how Dysart will do this, there’s no suggestion that anything as savage as lobotomy is on the cards – or even long-term medication.  That Dysart can, as he fears, reduce Alan to ‘a ghost’ of himself through the talking cure alone seems grossly to overstate the powers of psychoanalysis, taking other fictional shrinks, rather than real-world ones, as a guide.  This is a fallacy at the heart of Equus, yet a compelling production of the piece can make you suspend disbelief for as long as you’re watching.  This film, though, falls far short of compelling.

Sidney Lumet makes too many mistakes.  Although Equus is set in present-day south-west England (Hampshire), it was filmed entirely in Canada, in and around Ontario.  When the action moves outside the mental hospital, the physical scale of locations is sometimes wrong.  Lumet shoots two conversations between Dysart and Hesther Saloman at her home, where she seems to live alone.  Both sequences – one outdoors, one indoors – are opening out for the sake of it.  Outside the house, Hesther rakes a few leaves in grounds so vast that their upkeep must be a painting-the-Forth-Bridge job.  In her similarly impressive kitchen, she prepares a meal, but the kitchen activity is just a means of giving Richard Burton and Eileen Atkins something to do as they talk.  The bits of lettuce that he dabs with a tea towel are destined for an enormous salad bowl where they’ll be very lonely.  Whatever she puts in the oven doesn’t evidently emerge.  It’s a pretend meal, fine on stage but which looks daft in a superficially realistic film setting.  Lumet’s description of the hospital is no great shakes either.  It’s quite a traditional movie madhouse, with Alan’s fellow inmates loudly gibbering in corridors or staring into space in a communal day room.  Not that there are many of them.  Despite describing himself as ‘overworked’, Dysart is never seen with a patient other than Alan.

It’s no surprise in the light of his overall track record, but a pity nevertheless, that Lumet nails his colours to the mast of realism.  Although the introductory sequence of Alan and the horse together verges on laughable, the subsequent, more extended version of this, is one of the film’s most successful sequences.  Oswald Morris’ sensitive yet suggestive lighting of the scene briefly takes the film closer to the fantastical quality of its source material.  Lumet’s prevailing style, which goes against the grain of Shaffer’s original, reaches a disastrous climax in the decision to present Alan’s attack on the horses realistically.  Most reasonable viewers will probably blind themselves at this point, by looking away from the screen.

It was usual practice at the time, in movie versions of successful stage plays, to involve even in the smaller parts names bigger than those who’d played them in the theatre.  In Equus, this turns out to be another mistake.  Joan Plowright’s Dora is far too imposing and actressy.  Eileen Atkins gives theatrical brio to a role that’s half-sympathetic ear, half-devil’s advocate, but hardly a character at all.  As the stable owner, Harry Andrews hasn’t much to do except clench his formidable jaw.  It doesn’t help that Lumet, who’d only once previously directed a film drama set in contemporary Britain (The Offence (1973)), hasn’t a firm grasp of English class and regional distinctions.  Peter Firth, born in Bradford, plays Alan with a light West Yorkshire accent.  Although this isn’t a big deal (Alan’s family could have moved down to Hampshire), you wonder if Lumet is even aware of it.

On the plus side, Jenny Agutter is effective as sexy-horsey Jill, and Colin Blakely excellent as Alan’s father.  Giving a supporting part to an actor who, as noted above, had played Dysart on stage, epitomises the casting principles at work here, but they’re worth it in Blakely’s case.  The Strangs are an oddly assorted social unit, but that’s less of a problem thanks to Blakely’s Frank being indeterminate in terms of class.  Blakely even manages to give a semblance of truth to the bad scene where Frank slinks into the same blue-movie show that Alan and Jill are watching, and is spotted by his son.  But this is also an example of the folly of the film’s voiceovers.  Outside the cinema, Frank feebly tries to justify his presence there:  ‘I came to see the manager … the picture house needs posters … I had no idea they showed films like this … I’m certainly going to refuse my services’.  Alan’s voice describes the automatic sound of his father’s as he spoke those words.  Since Colin Blakely is already conveying that, we don’t need Alan’s explanation.

Peter Firth was the only member of the film’s cast who’d originated his role on stage.  When Equus opened at the National Theatre, Firth was barely out of his teens; by the time the film went into production, he was twenty-three but his limber, slender physique helps him pass convincingly as a teenager.  He gives a strong performance yet he’s always acting – you rarely feel Alan’s supposed wildness.  Peter Firth had probably played the part too often before – he was also in the first Broadway production – but there’s another problem with the character of Alan.  The Dysart-Alan opposition is essentially the same as the Salieri-Mozart one that Peter Shaffer went on to create in Amadeus; also as in that later work, he’s more comfortable writing the tormented rationalist than the undisciplined ecstatic.  With Alan Strang, Shaffer forces significant but discrepant elements into the same person.  (This happens with Alan’s mother too – Dora, a religious zealot, is also made to represent a traditional English horse world of jodhpurs and bowler-hatted riders.)  Dysart sees his patient as a virtually feral creature.  As he explains to Hesther, Alan ‘can hardly read … knows no physics or engineering to make the world real to him … no paintings to show him how others have enjoyed it … no music except television jingles’.  It’s as if Alan has never been to school – the same Alan who can reel off biblical genealogy and, as a young boy, was reading words in Latin.  In Alan Strang, Peter Shaffer does make two become one, but you don’t believe the merger.

30 December 2025