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3.88 AVERAGE
3.88 AVERAGE
This was incredible to watch live last year, and holds its own as a script as well. A disturbing plot that focuses around the psychology of a young man's actions. The relationship between Alan and Dysart is fascinating to read and so intricately woven that everything comes together perfectly at the end.
dark
slow-paced
Had to read it for school and two years later I'm still traumatized
I was impressed by the three-dimensional nature of this one. The different layers the author was able to create to make this more than just a flat stage play were hard to imagine through reading, but I got enough of a taste of it that I would love to see it performed, even with the harrowing & distressing nature of the crime.
Would be quite interesting to pair with Spring Awakening.
Interesting side note: This guy wrote Amadeus.
Favorite Quotes:
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! Spirits of certain trees, certain curves of brick wall, certain chip shops, if you like, and slate roofs, just as of certain frowns in people and slouches...
Whatever's happened has happened because of Alan. Alan is himself. Every soul is itself. If you added up everything we [his parents] ever did to him, from his first day on earth to this, you wouldn't find why he did this terrible thing - because that's him; not just all of our things added up.
Look...to go through life and call it yours - your life - you first have to get your own pain. Pain that's unique to you. You can't just dip into the common bin...
Without worship you shrink, it's as brutal as that...I shrank my own life. No one can do it for you. I settled for being pallid and provincial, out of my own eternal timidity.
Would be quite interesting to pair with Spring Awakening.
Interesting side note: This guy wrote Amadeus.
Favorite Quotes:
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! Spirits of certain trees, certain curves of brick wall, certain chip shops, if you like, and slate roofs, just as of certain frowns in people and slouches...
Whatever's happened has happened because of Alan. Alan is himself. Every soul is itself. If you added up everything we [his parents] ever did to him, from his first day on earth to this, you wouldn't find why he did this terrible thing - because that's him; not just all of our things added up.
Look...to go through life and call it yours - your life - you first have to get your own pain. Pain that's unique to you. You can't just dip into the common bin...
Without worship you shrink, it's as brutal as that...I shrank my own life. No one can do it for you. I settled for being pallid and provincial, out of my own eternal timidity.
dark
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
i love plays. i love works of fiction that feel above my comprehension. i love plays that feel above my comprehension.
beautifully disturbing, in that ‘young person just has something twisted about them’ way. a play that mixes religious fervour with sexual identity? sign me up. peter shaffer says in his foreword that ‘rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. publishing a play is a reversal of the process.’ this could not be more true of equus - though i don’t think the written play suffers. i came away from this with the very strong desire to see it in person, which i may be able to do later this year, fortuitously. i may have to settle for watching the film, perhaps, because i feel like this play is something that needs to be experienced.
anything that rattles you has done its job, for me. i love getting rattled by things. i understand it is ultimately about the rise of consumerism, materialism, secularism and the modern person’s inability to find organic passion in the world, but i specifically found the theme of the sublimation of desire (=worship?) to be the most interesting. alan finds his connection to equus inexplicable and full of fervour. this play is very perverse. i can only imagine how much more shocking it would have been when it was published in 1973, because it still shocks people 52 years later. it is truly fantastical, in that the entire thing is borne of a boy’s sick fantasy, and that it is expertly crafted.
shaffer attempts to make sense of what seems to be a senseless crime. he tries to link a boy’s loneliness and detachment from society to his madness.alan ‘creates’ his god, because the christianity his mother teaches him is discouraged by his father. he wants something to give himself wholly over to. drysart seems himself in the boy, or at least it sparks doubt in him about his own life and position in the world as a psychiatrist and the human condition. the two of them get twisted in each other, especially as drysart spurs alan on during his recollections. for such a short and fast-paced play, it only unravels itself bit by bit to the reader, before culminating at the end with a great bang that continues to reverberate well past the last word.
probably my favourite bit of symbolism in equus was the bit, and how alan would put it on himself. such a deceptively violent form of control. alan desperately wanted to free himself of the chains placed upon him by society, and yet there he was still, fashioning and placing that bit in his mouth, as part of his ritual.
beautifully disturbing, in that ‘young person just has something twisted about them’ way. a play that mixes religious fervour with sexual identity? sign me up. peter shaffer says in his foreword that ‘rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. publishing a play is a reversal of the process.’ this could not be more true of equus - though i don’t think the written play suffers. i came away from this with the very strong desire to see it in person, which i may be able to do later this year, fortuitously. i may have to settle for watching the film, perhaps, because i feel like this play is something that needs to be experienced.
anything that rattles you has done its job, for me. i love getting rattled by things. i understand it is ultimately about the rise of consumerism, materialism, secularism and the modern person’s inability to find organic passion in the world, but i specifically found the theme of the sublimation of desire (=worship?) to be the most interesting. alan finds his connection to equus inexplicable and full of fervour. this play is very perverse. i can only imagine how much more shocking it would have been when it was published in 1973, because it still shocks people 52 years later. it is truly fantastical, in that the entire thing is borne of a boy’s sick fantasy, and that it is expertly crafted.
shaffer attempts to make sense of what seems to be a senseless crime. he tries to link a boy’s loneliness and detachment from society to his madness.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Animal cruelty, Sexual content
Equus centres around a very violent crime done towards horses, and edges into, at the very least, pseudo-bestiality. It is also entirely in a medical (psychiatric) context.
challenging
dark
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Loveable characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Would've been a perfect accompaniment to my freshman philosophy classes haha (nietzsche, apollonian/dionysian and the tragedian yadda yadda)
Uzeh ovo da me malo drmne od dugih knjiga koje sam naredjao. Malo je predobro uradilo posao (ili, što bi srboenglezi rekli: drmnulo me, it did). Provlači se ovde svašta, osvrti na materijalizam (iako se duboko ne slažem da je to kritika, već samo portret jedne ličnosti), mentalnu bolest, licemerje, ali ona suštinska tema jeste religija. Ili makar verovanje, obožavanje, obogotvorenje. I kako se u srži te potpune vere uvek može naći jedna skrivena, skrovita mržnja prema tom istom božanstvu. Jer ko želi da bude uplašen? Ko želi da obožava personifikovanog konja? Ponekad je samo lakše. I taj sentiment je snažan.
p.s. na sve to, Šaferove direkcije potpuno oživljavaju štivo. U glavi sam konstantno zamišljao jedan jedinstven amalgam pozornice i filma, sa sve upečatljivom i jezivom horskom muzikom konja u topotu.
5
p.s. na sve to, Šaferove direkcije potpuno oživljavaju štivo. U glavi sam konstantno zamišljao jedan jedinstven amalgam pozornice i filma, sa sve upečatljivom i jezivom horskom muzikom konja u topotu.
5
See now THIS is theater. What in the hell did I just read? What would it be like to see this live, with a bunch of strangers surrounding you while all this shit is going on? How sublimely uncomfortable would that be? If the point of theater is to experience something new and thought-provoking, then this succeeded. My man Peter Shaffer heard about a guy blinding a horse and was like, Hm what happened there? Probably involves horse worship and erectile dysfunction. I wonder why Daniel Radcliffe wanted to be in this one. How did this even get on his radar? Fascinating. Imagine watching this and having absolutely no preconception of psychiatry and Freud's theories of sexual development. Imagine rural tourists visiting New York or London and going to see a play for the first time ever and they choose this one.
This was definitely one of the strangest things I have ever read and it was certainly a bit disturbing but it was one of the most captivating things I have ever read. I don't think I fully understood it but I have to give it full marks because it was so different from anything I have read before and never failed to grab my attention.
3.5/5
I'm on a roll of finally getting to/revisiting an author/playwright/composer of some breed of written material and, lo and behold, I find out after the fact that they're some flavor of queer. Survivorship bias and all that, but if you look at something like this work where desire, religion, and death breed together into some almighty magnifying-glass that, through its burning focal point, incinerates everything it casts its idol(izing/atrous) gaze upon and don't think that, maybe, there's some real world 1970s social abjection at work here, I don't know what to tell you. In any case, I'm sure watching this would have me gasping and pleading by the end of it, but when it's rendered in textual form and you know that desire, religion, and death are dime a dozen themes when it comes to any sort of 'transgressive' treatment of the so-called "Western" canon (especially when filtered through the Greek with all its taboos both homoerotic and homicide), it's hard not to cross compare this work into a lower tier. In any case, I can at least say that this play succeeded in leaving its mark on me under far from ideal circumstances. In fact, if it weren't already made clear, I will be seeing this in theatres at some point in my life, and if that isn't a strong enough recommendation despite my piddling number of awarded stars, I don't know what is.
I'm on a roll of finally getting to/revisiting an author/playwright/composer of some breed of written material and, lo and behold, I find out after the fact that they're some flavor of queer. Survivorship bias and all that, but if you look at something like this work where desire, religion, and death breed together into some almighty magnifying-glass that, through its burning focal point, incinerates everything it casts its idol(izing/atrous) gaze upon and don't think that, maybe, there's some real world 1970s social abjection at work here, I don't know what to tell you. In any case, I'm sure watching this would have me gasping and pleading by the end of it, but when it's rendered in textual form and you know that desire, religion, and death are dime a dozen themes when it comes to any sort of 'transgressive' treatment of the so-called "Western" canon (especially when filtered through the Greek with all its taboos both homoerotic and homicide), it's hard not to cross compare this work into a lower tier. In any case, I can at least say that this play succeeded in leaving its mark on me under far from ideal circumstances. In fact, if it weren't already made clear, I will be seeing this in theatres at some point in my life, and if that isn't a strong enough recommendation despite my piddling number of awarded stars, I don't know what is.
I have cut from them parts of individuality repugnant to this God, in both his aspects. Parts sacred to rarer and more wonderful Gods.