Harry Potter is in Peter Shaffer’s Equus. I suspect a lot of the crowd (screaming teenage girls) were there exclusively for the play even though there is a clear warning that some material may be unsuitable for children. When it premiered at the National Theater on July 26, 1973, it was unusual and received as such. Tonight it played at the Gielgud Theatre on Shaftesbury. Briefly put, the play is about Alan, an obedient 17 year old with a passion for horses who suddenly one night blinds six horses with a hoof pick and thereafter is awakened by terrible nightmares. Dysart (played by Richard Griffiths from “The History Boys” but who also played Uncle Dudley to Harry Potter, small world this) is his psychologist. The play will move Stateside and open in Broadway in September 2008, no doubt to much cheering from those who will fly all the way to see Mr. Radcliffe get his kit off.
It is adequate as a play but is wonderful as a theatrical production. Regardless of the media hyperdrive surrounding the young wizard getting his kit off, the set design impresses. Messrs Potter (umm Radcliffe) and Griffiths are constantly on stage, even if they are not participating in the active scenery. A curved balcony constructed over the Gielgud stage makes for the play to be performed almost in the round, as if we the audience were looking down into an operating theater of yore even as, looking from above, Dysart dissects Strang’s mind. On floor level about the stage are stable doors, wherefrom stylized horses emerge (played by men wearing horse heads of twisted metal). It is well written – a boy consumed by passion, teen angst and parental overburden is matching wits with an intellectual trapped in a passion-free marriage and boredom-enhanced lifetime. As the stable girl offers the boy his first sexual experience [his failure to deliver sexually provokes the crime against the horses he loves so much], Mr. Radcliffe has to appear in the nude. What horrifies more is the legion who has come precisely to see just those naughty bits.
