Peter Shaffer’s Equus remains a disquieting and deeply ambiguous play, and Lindsay Posner’s revival at the Menier Chocolate Factory leans fully into that unease. This is not a production interested in easy answers. Instead, it presents a troubling psychological landscape in which repression, desire and worship blur, and where healing itself begins to look suspiciously like an act of violence and voyeurism.
At its centre are two expertly calibrated performances. Noah Valentine is extraordinary as Alan Strang, charting a journey from an apparently frightened, inarticulate teenager to something far more dangerous and unknowable. Valentine never allows Alan to become a mere symbol; he is both terrifying and pitiable, a young man caught between ecstatic freedom and profound damage. As the story unfolds, empathy creeps in, making his final confessions all the more disturbing. Valentine handles the play’s thorny intersections of sexuality and shame with remarkable honesty.
Opposite him, Toby Stephens brings a measured intelligence to psychiatrist Martin Dysart. His performance is rooted in compassion, yet shadowed by something more self-serving. Stephens suggests a man who genuinely wants to help Alan, while simultaneously using the case to fill the spiritual void in his own life. There are moments when Dysart feels uncomfortably close to a voyeur, observing Alan’s suffering with the same unsettled fascination as the audience. Stephens anchors the production, guiding it through its moral uncertainties.
Amanda Abbington’s Hesther Salomon provides a crucial counterpoint. Her performance is warm yet resolute, grounding the drama in human concern without diluting its complexity, underscoring the play’s central questions about responsibility and care.
The production’s atmosphere is meticulously controlled. Paul Farnsworth’s stripped-back design transforms the Menier’s intimate space into something resembling a psychiatric void, a dark space that could as easily be the depths of Alan’s mind or the stables at midnight. Yet within this starkness, the stage feels like something almost sacred, particularly in the beautifully lit final confession. Paul Pyant’s lighting shifts imperceptibly between psychiatrist office and ritual space, while Adam Cork’s sound design, used sparingly, introduces an undercurrent of dread that hums throughout the evening.
A particularly striking choice in this Equus is the representation of the horses. Rather than relying on elaborate puppetry, six actors (led by Ed Mitchell as Nugget and the young horseman) embody them through movement alone. The result is astonishingly effective. Under James Cousins’ choreography, they move with an uncanny physical precision, at times coalescing into a single, breathing entity that feels both majestic and threatening. Their constant presence, observing from the margins, heightens the sense that we are witnessing something forbidden.
Despite moments of unexpected humour in Shaffer’s text, Posner keeps the tone predominantly serious, allowing tension to accumulate. The Menier’s intimacy proves a powerful asset; the proximity of the audience intensifies every confession, every flicker of discomfort. There are moments here that genuinely unsettle, particularly Alan’s climactic disclosures, staged with a restraint that makes them all the more gripping.
What emerges is a production that preserves the play’s essential ambiguity. It refuses to side with rationalism over obsession, or civilisation over instinct, instead leaving us suspended between them, questioning whether the cost of “normality” might be too high. This Equus feels acutely contemporary in its exploration of masculinity, repression and the search for meaning. It is, ultimately, a superb revival, unflinching in its gaze, precise in its execution and deeply affecting in its impact.
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