Last Saturday afternoon I saw this with Jewelsong and her two daughters. Dear Jewel had a spare ticket (profusely thanks Jewel’s poor friend who was ill.) It’s booked solid now to 9 June, so thank you to Jewel!
It's a simply fantastic production, an electrifying piece of theatre. Great review here (I share the reviewer's opinion of the play, to some degree, and also their high opinion of young Dan):
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... &HBX_OU=50
Richard Griffiths, known to millions of HP fans as Uncle Vernon, plays Martin Dysart, the shrink. Griffiths is a much-loved British character actor who has been appearing on our screens for years in various TV dramas and feature films. This was the first time I'd seen him on stage, and he is just wonderful. His self-doubting but compassionate Dysart holds the stage, gives the play its moral centre and provides a wonderful, measured counterpart to the incredible intensity of Daniel's Alan.
Daniel is extraordinarily intense, right from the electrifying moment he first paces onto the stage, as wound up as a horse about to bolt, fixing the audience with the weird accusatory stare that Dysart finds so un-nerving. With good reason: Alan Strang has done something truly horrible.
So how are we supposed to find this young man remotely sympathetic? A callous young jerk who blinded six horses?
Such is the power and rawness of young Dan's performance, such is the effectiveness with which he conveys Alan's sexual and spiritual confusion and his awful isolation, that by the end of the play I wanted to cradle this wounded boy in my arms with the same tenderness that Dysart does.
The play's premise is a simple one: humans are hard-wired to worship something and our lives atrophy when this instinct is denied. Not that I disagree with Shaffer about this, I think it's true, but I do think he really over-eggs the pudding in his somewhat histrionic treatment of the connection between religion and sexuality. This aspect of the play is somewhat redeemed by Dysart's doubts about his own profession, his deep cynicism that psychiatry (a valuable profession in its own right) has become a substitute for religion.
And what the heck – it made for great theatre.
The set is starkly lit and the six guys who play the horses wear the famous wire horsemasks originally designed by John Napier in 1973 . It is amazingly effective: those huge horse-heads are menacing, glowing with power, and one can fully understand why Alan finds the Horse such a god-like creature.
The play has some beautiful speeches - the one which moved me especially was the scene in which Alan's devout mother (played excellently by Irish actress Gabrielle Reidy, who was the artist's jealous wife in Girl with a Pearl Ear-ring) tearfully expresses her anguish and bewilderment at his awful crime to Dysart. Why are the parents always seen as the villains, she cries. We loved Alan: we didn't do this to him. Alan has chosen to do this, he is his own soul, it's his own choice.
The play's great climactic scene is the one in which Jill Mason, a seductive but gentle Eve, attempts to seduce Alan and it all goes horribly wrong. Joanna Christie as Jill gives a fine performance: she is extremely tender with Alan and is devastated when he turns on her. He doesn't just turn on her, of course: his sexual confusion explodes with dark and dreadful results. Dan (and his partner Joanna) are both naked for the duration for this scene, and there's nothing gratuitous about it: Dan's character is being stripped naked in every sense of the word, stripped completely - mentally, emotionally, spiritually.
As Jill and Alan undressed, their bodies half-hidden in shadows, you could have heard a pin drop. Nobody tittered. Nobody squealed. The silence in the theatre was electrifying.
I was on edge because I knew what the outcome of this scene would be … a brief moment of tenderness before catastrophe falls.
Young Dan's performance will stay with me for a long time ... as will Griffiths's. And after rapturous applause, Dan left the stage with his arm around Richard’s shoulders. Awwwwww.
By the way, I read a review of Equus in yesterday's London Metro. The Metro likes to interview people on the street about their opinions of recent plays and films. One Imogen of Farringdon opined that "Daniel Radcliffe is not an inspired actor but the part of Alan Strang doesn't require him to be".
Well, Imogen of Farringdon, you are clueless. Yeah, Alan Strang is a really bland part to play. Not. A mentally unstable and sexually confused young man who commits a terrible act of violence? Nah, you don't need to be inspired to play that.
As one of my friends said, she was probably the same chick who complained about everybody reading Harry Potter on the Tube.
but very nice for me! 
