Equus

Much of my play-going recently has been in and around Leicester so it was a pleasant change to drive over to Nottingham Playhouse to see their Advance Youth Theatre's ambitious production of Peter Shaffer's Equus.
Staged in the intimate Neville Studio space the audience is ranged around three sides of a mock court room or medical lecture theatre with the ensemble cast along the back wall.
All this is to delve into the motives of one Alan Strang, a repressed, emotionally stilted teenager, who has been caught blinding six horses in a stable. Over the course of the play we slowly unravel the background to this troubled boy and, in parallel, discover some of the secrets of the very Doctor tasked with treating him. Dr Dysart's inadequacies are balanced by his healing of Alan Strang
A cast of drama students ranging from 15 to 19 means that some of the more explicit scenes have necessarily had to be cut. The notorious nude scene, Daniel Radcliffe's historic coming of age, is played only semi nude and the staging of the blinding of the horses is imaginatively represented without the rivers of blood seen in some productions.
Three actors especially deserve singling out for their mature performances. Tom Martin as Alan Strang has probably the hardest role to play swinging wildly from surly to abusive to compliant as his character tries desperately to communicate the angst within him
Acting opposite him as Dr Dysart Jacob Seelochan is tasked with moving the plot along and trying to explain to the audience the inner workings of the mind of his patient. While he is to admired for his mastery of the huge chunks of dialogue he is burdened with Jacob does need to get his head up off his chest a bit more and not gabble so much of his speech as though his mind is working faster than his mouth.
Finally special mention has to go to Dylan Sutcliff who played Nugget, Strang's especial favourite horse. Dylan's sensual physicality made you believe unconditionally that the boy could love him. Acting within the confines of the War Horse-esque horse heads made his task even harder but his character shone through and marks him out for a worthy future career in the theatre.

First published in Western Gazette 
© Paul Towers 2014