Scene Breakdown

Given Circumstances

TIME/PREVIOUS ACTION

• Dysart treats younger people 15-18 yr. olds
• Dysart is in mid-life
• Hesther argued for 2 hours straight to get Alan into a clinic.
• Hesther and Dysart have know each other for years...old friends/colleagues.
• Alan blinded 6 horses in one evening.
• Alan worked all the time. In a shop and the stables on the weekends.
• Alan is 17 years old.
• Television jingles from early 1970s
• The night after Alan arrives Dysart has the sacrificial dream.
• Dysart wonders about professional menopause---stagnation?
• Dysart wants to spend the next ten years (until retirement) in Greece.
• It takes Alan two days to answer Dysart’s question.
• Nightime is bad for Alan-nightmares.
• Frank, Dora, and Dalton are middle-aged.
• Alan has been at the clinic 3 days before they have a real conversation...history.
• Dysart plans a visit to the Strangs on a Sunday.
• Frank works on the Sabbath.
• Dysart sees Alan for sessions in the mornings.
• Alan was 6 years old when he first saw a horse.
• Dysart has daily time allotted with Alan. “Our time is up. See you tomorrow.”
• Dora shows up at the hospital late afternoon/early evening to tattle on Frank.
• Alan was 12 years old when the business with the Christ/horse picture took place.
• Alan spent hours grooming the horses...never rushed or treated it as work.
• Alan’s horse fetish has been around for years. “Years I never told anyone”
• Frank comes by late in the day to tattle on Dora.
• Frank caught Alan “praying” to Equus 18 months ago.
• Alan met Jill on a Saturday a year ago.
• 60 months to normal- Sometimes takes decades to tackle and reverse trauma
• The most significant things happen at night.
• Swedish film “Maid in Sweden” was made in 1971
• Frank, Alan, and Jill don’t speak for five minutes at the bus stop.
• Alan was out with a girl the night before the incident
• Frank witnessed Alan praying to Equus 18 months before the incident
• Alan and Jill met at his job at Bryson’s hardware
• Alan would often go to the stables and watch the horses on his lunch break
• Frank was often late coming home. (at the adult cinema)
• Jill’s father abandoned her and her mother
• Dora has heard all her life that she and Frank are to blame for Alan. Hmmm.
• Frank forbade television
• Frank gave Alan a horse photo to replace a a destroyed “kinky” picture of Christ being crucified.
• Alan saw a real horse for the first time on a beach at age 6.
• Dora used to read Alan the Bible every night.
• Alan never got a proper ‘birds and bees” chat.
• Jill introduced Alan to Dalton and got him the job at the stables
• Dalton suspected the horses were being ridden at night.

TIME/PREVIOUS ACTION

The play takes place in the early Seventies.

Time sets characters’s ages...lot’s of middle-aged people going through life changes and young people going through adolescent/emotional changes. “I have wasted my life” “I have an evil/perverted child” “It’s all my fault.” “ Sex is fun/Sex is wicked.”  “I haven’t kissed my wife in six years.” These thoughts, at these very particular points in the characters’s lives, power them, possess them, and compel them to do the things they do. 

Alan’s obsession with horses did not happen overnight. It has been around a while, probably since the experience at the beach when he was six. When he was twelve (budding adolescence) the incident with the picture of Christ and the horse poster connects  the god slave Equus to both Alan’s belief system and his sexual identity. It is Alan’s big secret and has been suppressed for years, like water bubbling under a tight lid. He fights to keep this secret while Dysart digs for it.

Time establishes order of events...simple plot points through which the action flows. Flashbacks are used generously. It is worth noting that there are two tricks present here too. First, the monologues at the tops of both acts perform a neat function. They both begin the same, giving the impression that the play is really beginning at the top of Act 2...that Act 1 had been in flashback. All at once this trick gives us a safety net we never knew we had and then takes it away, leaving the characters completely exposed, vulnerable and open to disaster in the last half of the play. Second, the last scene of the play is actually the first thing that happens chronologically. The play saves the blinding of the horses until last, giving the whole play (especially Act 2) a steady but cresting momentum---a wave folding in on itself. It makes the play as much a mystery play as anything else, only explained in the last few scenes.

Time creates urgency. Hesther has to fight hard for several hours to save Alan, his case is so disturbing. He presumably has only a certain amount of time to make progress in the clinic before he is sent somewhere less pleasant. Alan needs days to even speak, though. He’s in shock and unable to communicate for several days. As the play unfolds, Dysart begins to break up his schedule and routine to see more of Alan, ultimately bringing the boy into his office alone in the dead of night to have a private session. This tells us that the situation is dire to warrant such unprofessional behavior and/or that Dysart has become obsessed with this particular case.

PLACE

• Clinic, Dysart’s office, Alan’s room, A corridor at the hospital,The Strang home, The stables, A beach, An adult cinema, A bus stop
• The Set- Stage, Audience, Actors as witnesses/chorus. Rules of place in world of play.
• A Provincial Hospital
• Stables near Winchester
• Alan is moved from noisy Neville Ward to a private bedroom after first meeting
• Alan travelled from Winchester by train.
• Alan works in Bryson’s, a hardware store.
• Dysart is fascinated by Greece.
• Alan shares a bathroom.
• The Strang Living Room
• Alan once had a friend next door.
• Brighton downs.
• The sea
• On the horse.
• Old West
• Calvary, Horse photo/Shrine,Temple
• Reeds Art Shop
• What happens in Dysart’s Office is confidential...safe place.
• Alan’s bedroom at home is upstairs---Dora’s and Frank’s down?
• What’s Northern Hygienic?
• Glasgow-Mrs. Dysart is Scottish
• Crete, Mt. Olympus, Argos, Mycenae- archaeological dig in Greece.
• Dalton’s stable is two miles from the Strang house.
• Frank is not seated with Dora in Act 2
• Hampshire (County?) Winchester (City?)
• Jill lives a mile from the stables.
• Dark auditorium
• Queue (waiting place)
• The cinema is four miles from Jill’s house.
• A street in Winchester-street, pubs, people---moving into the countryside.

PLACE

A single set becomes a variety of places, primarily Dysart’s office and the hospital. The action takes place in the hospital which becomes the other places in flashback and Alan’s memory.

Places become substitutions for religious locales. The barn becomes a church. The  stables are “holiest of the holies.” The meadow becomes the “Haha place”  a place of sexual or religious ecstasy. In front of and beneath the poster of the horse becomes a shrine to Equus. Religious locations are mentioned frequently too---temples, churches, Calvary where Christ died. A bevy of Greek name places are tossed about (Argos, Crete, Mycenae, Mediterranean, Mt. Olympus etc.) representing a dead religion...dead old gods of myth.

(Discuss the ritual of the play...places onstage, chorus, audience, and rules of interaction)

SOCIETY/ECONOMY/POLITICS

• Immovably English. Proper. Suppressed sexual desire.
• Hesther is a Magistrate.
• Karl Marx
• Old School Socialist
• Alan lives with his parents.
• Television jingles, martinis. Alan has a child’s view of the world.
• Frank does not approve of television.
• Frank is working class. A printer.
• Dora is an ex-teacher.
• Riding at the downs. Dora married down a peg.
• Alan rakes manure and grooms horses...low level untrained labor.
• The Strangs are courteous. They offer tea to Dysart. They know how to behave. 
• Dysart makes 20 quid an hour...about $25/hr. in American money
• Alan is largely uneducated.
• Alan has one unnamed friend from years back in his childhood. Otherwise isolated.
• Frank is prejudiced against the upper class calls them “riff raff.”
• Dora is now a housewife...maybe retired from teaching to raise Alan.
• Alan works in a hardware store during the week and in the stables on the weekends.
• Dalton owns or runs a stables. Runs them for someone else?
• Dalton is conservative-doesn’t believe taxpayers should pay for Alan’s hospitalization.
• Dalton lives at the stables with his son.
• Dalton has lost six of his best horses.
• Dora looks down on Alan’s work. “Shops are common.”
• Jill is middle class.
• Jill’s father left her and her mother. Her mother now works.
• Dysart is a married man. No children.
• Mrs. Dysart is a boring dentist.
• Hesther and Dysart are colleagues...maybe more?
• Hesther knows Mrs. Dysart too.
• Mrs. Dysart is practical, a doer...the antithesis of a romantic.
• Normal is a dirty word for Dysart for most of the play. It is repeated dozens of times.
• Sex, for Alan, has become tangled in the ritual of riding Nugget at night.
• Dysart and the Nurse have a very professional relationship. No names. Doctor. Nurse.
• Dora insists Alan had a “normal” upbringing.
• Alan grows to trust Dysart.
• Dysart is unhappy in his marriage and life.
• Alan goes on his first date with Jill.
• Alan and Jill go to an adult cinema in Winchester. Jill is the only female in the theater.
• Frank is embarrassed to be caught in the cinema.
• Jill’s mother doesn’t allow her to bring boys back to their home.

SOCIETY/ECONOMY/POLITICS

Everyone in the play is middle class...working class. Dysart, a doctor, has status because of his education and position, but he is merely a trained professional.  Dysart and Hesther are employed by the government. Alan’s parents, Frank and Dora are a printer and former teacher, respectively...although if you went one generation back there would be a strong class division between Frank’s and Dora’s families. Dora has married down and Frank has married up. The mutual, albeit low-level prejudice keeps the two isolated from one another through most of the play. Frank and Dora consider themselves to be a normal family. Ironically, they turn on each other and then finally on Alan in an effort to place blame for his behavior and hide the utter lack of normalcy in their lives.

In terms of politics, Dysart and Hesther work for the government and are bound by fairly strict rules. Hesther has to go through proper routes and intense debate with colleagues to get keep Alan out of prison. Dysart seems to have a little more leeway in his methods, presumably because his work (in 1971) is less understood by regulators.

Frank is the most politically minded character in the play.  Dysart calls him an old school Socialist. His opinions seem less political, though, and more like secular humanism as a means to aggravate his religiously charged wife and as a means to motivate and control his son. 

Dysart is unhappy in his personal life. He admits to a restlessness in his work and a lack of intimacy with his wife. Dysart is painted by Hesther to be a successful, educated, and respected public servant, trained to help children. His lack of fulfillment is exacerbated by his polar opposite Alan, an isolated, uneducated youth whose only steady routine is a sexually charged, nighttime horseback ride once a night every three weeks. Alan’s freedom makes Dysart yearn for something similar, something so different from his perceived grey and lackluster life. Literally, the more Dysart learns about Alan through the course of the play, the more desperate and unhinged he becomes in the shadow of this wild abandon. In a sense, Equus is taking possession of Dysart through Alan.

Dysart and Hesther have a longtime professional relationship. Whether or not this has ever crossed into something personal or sexual is not clear. It is clear that there is an attraction, though. Both Dysart and Hesther have to acknowledge their feelings and navigate through them in order to help Alan. Dysart hopes Hesther can help him feel passionate and alive while Hesther is determined to focus all her energy on the boy who has affected her so deeply.

The British have a reputation for being repressed and cool...not asexual, but proper---”immovably English.” This can be seen clearly in Dysart’s relationship with both his wife and his platonic friendship with Hesther. Frank, too, has similar issues. In all respects he is a good man and decent husband to Dora---a normal husband and father. Underneath this veneer of normalcy, though, is a sexually intense and sometimes seedy world of suppressed desire and longing. Alan’s sexual awakening, his attraction to Jill and the night rides with Nugget, is both the key to his salvation and the darkest secret he has to keep hidden. Frank’s clandestine outings to the adult cinema, which have replaced intimacy with his spiritually minded wife, is a secret he won’t reveal...even to help Alan. Frank, Dora, and Alan try to hide the sexual aspects of Alan’s case while Dysart is determined to bring it to light. This tension fuels the play from a social standpoint. To save Alan means to surrender any illusion of propriety or normalcy.

RELIGION

• God/Atheism/Paganism
• Ritual
• Dysart dreams he is a pagan priest performing a ritual sacrifice
• Dysart visits the Strangs on the sabbath.
• Frank works on Sunday.
• Christian Calvary
• Horse God
• Dora is “excessively religious”
• Frank is an Atheist
• Frank blames religion for Alan’s problems
• Dora thinks sex is a spiritual matter.
• Dora is aware that Frank makes fun of her beliefs
• Our Lord, take my sins, God sees you, sins of the world, holy of holies, spake unto you
• Chanting lists of progeny
• Alan kneels before the Equus image as if praying to God.
• Alan self flagellates
• Dysart calls his wife “worshipless”
• Dysart calls himself a priest to the “God of Health”
• Zeus, Dionysus, Centaurs, sea where Gods used to bathe---Mediterranean?
• Alan and Dysart compare Equus’s chains to Jesus
• The ritual of the doctor and patient
• The ritual of riding/manbit
• The ritual of the actors becoming the characters or horses
• Alan compares a lump of sugar to “The Last Supper”
• The King, Hosts of Bowler, Hoover, Philco---religious title and appliance names
• Alan kneels at Nugget’s hooves as if in worshipful prayer.
• Dora has clear idea of what a “soul” is or should be.
• Dora says Dysart doesn’t know God
• Dora says the Devil came into Alan---possessed him and made him blind the horses.
• Alan says “with my body I thee worship”
• “Worship” is said dozens of times.
• Alan says the men in the cinema were “staring like they were in church.”
• Equus is referred to as “Him”
• Alan calls Him “Equus the kind”
• Dysart calls Him “ Thy Lord God”
• Alan calls Equus “Godslave” multiple times.

RELIGION

Religion pushes hard against society in the world of the play. The characters’s secret desires are sandwiched between both religion and society’s ideas of normalcy and proper behavior and then squeezed. This provides the tension that powers the engine of the play. 

Religion, as we know it, is mashed up with Equus worship. Virtually everything about Alan’s worship of Equus has a counterpart in Christianity. Equus is referred to as “Him.” Alan calls Nugget’s lump of sugar “the last supper” and the word “worship” is used dozens of times while referring to Alan’s routines at the stables with the horses. There are countless rituals, mirroring everything from a child’s bedtime prayers to Sundays at Church to being slain in the spirit, referring to religious ecstasy when overtaken by the holy spirit.

There is also the question of where Equus the Godslave came from. From a purely logical standpoint he is the symptom of a sick mind. Alan has unconsciously created a god to worship cobbled together from fragments of Christianity, Paganism, his own imagination...and even name brands of household appliances (Hosts of Hoover, Philco, etc.) The play suggests that the tension between a doting but weak mother’s religious views and an overbearing father’s political beliefs has somehow warped Alan. 

Another answer might be that Equus is not simply a by-product of mental illness, that Equus has less to do with the science of the mind and more to do with the Greek gods. What if Equus was an entity that has, through Alan, found a way to re-emerge from the darkness into the world? An old god? A devil? This sort of worldview is certainly not unique in the play. There are plenty of mentions of paganism and the old gods---myths only because we choose to call them that. How is Alan’s worship of the Equus entity less relevant than Dora’s belief in Christ and the devil?