Sex in Equus

In 2007, one of the greatest playwrights of our time, Peter Shaffer’s most well-known play, Equus, first produced in 1973, was staged in London. It created a craze at the time with young girls around the world rushing to London to see Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliff) naked on stage.

In this 2007 reproduction, Radcliff played the role of Alan, a seventeen-year-old boy who is sent to a psychiatrist because he blinded six horses. Under the psychiatric care of Martin Dysart, Alan slowly reveals his religious obsession with horses which he worships in an attempt to placate his own confused feelings such as his inability to perform sexually with his girlfriend. Alan’s failed sexual encounter with his girlfriend in the stable leads to his attack on the horses, blinding them as he believes they condemn him for his sexual activity.

In this play, Alan’s secret worship ritual of his god resembles sexual intercourse, he chanted as he rides the horse naked in a field in the middle of the night, “Feel me on you! On you! On you! On you! / I want to be in you! / I want to BE you forever and ever! – / Equus, I love you! / Now! – / Bear me away! / Make us One Person! […] AMEN”. During his ritual of worship he encounters a sense of liberation as he is not seen by people. It is a moment that belongs only to him and his god, which represents true intimacy and is the ultimate expression of love.

Alan needs worship at the same time he thirsts for life, a life that is his own. Sexuality in this play represents passion, and it is this passion in life which Alan gained in his worship that differentiates Alan from his psychiatrist Dysart, who is ensnared by society. Dysart realizes the barrenness of his life, but it is only when faced with a passionate worshipper, Alan, that he understands what he is lacking.

Jenny Oliveros Lao - MBA, MA in Literature. Lecturer, School of Management, Leadership and Government, USJ.

Issues of Sexuality


Open displays or discussion of sexuality in modern drama swiftly escalated as the twentieth century progressed, beginning with a virtual silence about such matters to a point where talk about sex has become relatively commonplace and full frontal nudity hardly even shocking. In 1947, the “rape” of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire is only inferred, as it takes place offstage, but by 1975 we watch Alan Strang, in Equus , simulate an orgasm while naked onstage, and by the 1980s, playwrights were relatively free to openly discuss homosexuality. Some plays use sex as a means of titillation or to shock their audiences; others explore issues of sexuality with greater sensitivity, striving to expand our understanding and tolerance of both heterosexuality and homosexuality.

The period of burgeoning sexuality that comes with the onset of puberty often seems the most problematic, at times even traumatic. Moral expectations and an entrenched social prudery that has long made us squeamish in matters of sexuality make this a time of suppression as well as discovery. How young people learn to express (or repress) their sexuality and how they view that of others often stays with them into adulthood. Seventeen-year-old Alan Strang, the teenage protagonist of Peter Shaffer’s Equus , presents an extreme case of adolescent sexuality gone awry through the skewered instruction he has received from his parents and his own desire for companionship and spiritual fulfillment. The psychiatrist brought in to examine Alan, after he has mutilated six horses, is both horrified and attracted to the strange sexual religion Alan creates for himself. Shaffer’s play suggests an underlying relationship between sex and religion; both, when most satisfying, have roots in the spiritual and both can have unpleasant consequences, often leading to violence, when restricted.

The events of Equus are related largely through a series of flashbacks by psychiatrist Martin Dysart, who has been trying to discover why a formerly quiet teen gouged out the eyes of a group of horses. Dysart relates his findings, that Alan, in response to his father’s anger and his mother’s religious teachings, formed a personal religion that helped him to deal with his growing sexual feelings, but that unwittingly led to this dreadful crime. It becomes clear that Dysart envies Alan’s passion, even though it manifested itself so destructively, and feels disillusioned with the restrictive world of normalcy he inhabits by contrast.

Despite its combative setting inside a boxing ring, the opening images of a boy tenderly fondling the sculpted head of a horse, which appears to reciprocate his affection, seem at odds with the knowledge we are soon given that this same boy has recently stabbed out the eyes of six horses with a steel spike. The boxing ring setting warns us of the violence to come, but it is more the psychic torment of the boy than the physical pain of the blinded horses that undergirds the drama. This is a crime so heinous that most doctors view him as unworthy of help and want him locked up in jail. Dysart, however, finds himself emotionally drawn to the power of the passion that must have caused such behavior.


Dora Strang, Alan’s mother, has devoted years to reading the Bible to her son and instilling in him the belief that sex must be “spiritual” or it is sinful and that God is always watching with eyes that are everywhere. Central to her belief is the idea of Christ, and the painful death he underwent, a scene of which she has placed on her son’s bedroom wall. We will find that she is partly to blame for her son’s unorthodox sexual development, but the authoritarian treatment by Frank Strang, Alan’s father, is also responsible.

Fiercely controlling, Frank forbids Alan to watch television and mocks his wife’s religious beliefs to the point where he rips down her picture of Christ and, what will later become highly significant, replaces it with a picture of a horse.

Frank blames Alan’s religious upbringing for his crimes and accepts no personal responsibility.
But Alan is largely led by his father’s mockery of Christianity, and a home life of constant tension from which he needs an escape, to create a religion of his own.

Having had Christ’s picture on his wall exchanged for that of a horse, it is unsurprising that the god of the twelve-year-old Alan’s new religion takes the form of a horse. He calls it Equus, and just as his picture of Christ had been in chains, Equus must always wear a chain in his mouth for the “sins of the world.” The riding stable where he works becomes a Temple, from which he takes horses late at night to ride naked and bareback until he reaches an orgasm, which makes him feel as if he is united with his god. Thus he merges sex and religion, and unites both spiritual and sexual longing in a fashion that satisfies his growing need for release, exacerbated by his unhappy home life with constantly bickering parents. Under hypnosis, Alan reenacts his bizarre ritual for Dysart, who feels stimulated by the resulting scene of freedom, unfettered by what he sees as stifling social restraints.

The blinding of the horses grows out of Alan’s increased desire, as he grows older, to experience sex with a girl, and the accompanying guilt that God must be watching his attempt to commit such a sin. Jill Mason, another stable employee, persuades Alan to take her to a sex movie. To the embarrassment of both father and son, Frank attends the same show, which prompts Alan’s association of guilt with sex. Following this, Jill tries to seduce Alan at the stable, but his fear of being watched by God (who in his religion appears as a horse) leads him to impotence. Angry at both her and the possibility that having seen his sinful behavior his God may now abandon him, he threatens Jill with a steel spike and, when she flees, turns on the watching horses in a state of panic and stops them from looking any longer.

Having uncovered Alan’s secret, Dysart knows he can work with the boy and make him “normal,” but there is a part of Dysart that does not want to do this. Alan’s fervor and passion, although dangerous, are at least less predictable, more original and alive than the normalcy Dysart sees as restricting himself and others. Dysart’s childless marriage is mutually convenient but without passion, and he sees Alan’s ability to experience such ferocious passion as enviable.

In archetypal terms, what Shaffer shows us is the difference between the Apollonian and Dionysian approaches to life. Dysart is the embodiment of the Apollonian, with his rational mind and controlled emotions, but balanced against this is the irrational, wild passion exhibited by Alan in his moment of orgiastic freedom riding across the open field. Shaffer asks us to question which is ultimately the more fulfilling.

Pablo Madeo, Rodrigo Laje, Lucas Plesky