Great plays with bestiality as a major theme is (I think/hope) a slender category, but Equus is certainly an exception.

Peter Shaffer was inspired to write it when he heard the case of a 17-year old boy who had blinded six horses: he kept the crime and the age of the protagonist, but then invented everything else. The play centres on the attempts of psychiatrist Dr Martin Dysart (James Parkinson) to uncover the sexual/religious equestrian obsession that led Alan Strang (Tom Clarke) to commit his ghastly act of horse-mutilation.

Parkinson and Clarke were admirable in the way they respectively captured a deeply screwed-up teenager and a depressed shrink having something of a mid-life crisis. This double-act was neatly complemented by the supporting parts. I particularly liked Jack Hudson’s rendition of Alan’s dad Frank: his joyously pompous, excessively paternal tone of voice got a “relentlessly self-improving… socialist” down to a tee.

Director Dan MacPherson deserves praise too. The intimate space, theatre-in-the-round and actors in the audience, all lent the production a pervasive claustrophobia, which itself conspired to make empathising with our deranged hero much easier. On seeing the not-exactly-lavish set I first sighed at the prospect of yet another ‘stripped-down’ Cambridge play: but was then pleasantly surprised at how three wooden boxes can intuitively carry us from psychiatrists’ office, to family home, to a stables and so on (and, needless to say, scene-changes were lightning-quick). 

I know what you’re thinking: when the hell is he going to shut-up and tell us whether there’s nakedness (à la Daniel Radcliffe)? Well, suffice to say, that there very much was. And my vote would be not to dismiss it as a gimmick. Rather, the theatrical purpose served was that, in making the audience just a little bit squeamish, it gave us a taste of the immense sexual repression and confusion that the naked boy before us is himself suffering from.

On the negative side, I did feel that the cast weren’t quite collectively strong enough to allow us to fully suspend our disbelief. For example James Parkinson (despite the overall strength of his performance) was particularly guilty of garbling, by which I mean beginning to say a word, faltering, and then continuing. And little niggly things like this, do unfortunately serve to remind the audience that it’s not real, and the characters are actually reciting pre-written scripts. It’s jolly long too (2 hrs 40 mins including the interval), and humourless.

Ultimately though, this is a good production of a great play, so go.