Dir: Vikram Iyengar, Writer: Peter Shaffer, Cast: Amlan Chaudhuri, Daminee Mukherji, Jayanta Chakraborty, Shahab Kamal.
Jack Gilbert once said 'Everything worth doing is worth doing badly', and maybe Vikram Iyengar's attempt to recreate Equus on the Prithvi stage could be a way of seeing the greater amount of truth in the statement.
Equus,considered to be one of the most powerful plays by Peter Shaffer is an intelligent, contemporary drama which when premiered in the London stage was a huge success among the audience and the critics.
The story is about a young boy called Allan Strang, his deed of blinding six horses at a stable one night and his treatement by the psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Dysart.
In it different perspectives entwine, revolt against and dispute the ideas of reality and unreality and collectively lead to a greater dilema that whether there exists a space where Alan and his abhorrant act could be understood and accounted for.
Every ideology, be it religious or political, socialist or capitalist creates a Good, an Evil, a Benefactor and a Sufferer. Alan's character really speaks about the difficulty of fitting into such inevitable cycles and the futility of being completely unoriginal.
Dr Dysart's reservations on psychiatry and its attempt to heal mental illness seems to be an attempt to disillusion himself from the facades of Conventional Normalcy.
Through the long dialogues with Alan, he really seems to be questioning himself on whether being 'Normal' and mentally well is about living a squarish life deviod of any passion that has'nt been documented, studied and socially endorsed before.
Allan's worship of The Horse manifests itself at the deeper levels of spirituality, sexuality and romance.however it does not fit into the realm of accepted behaviour and therefore becomes dangerous and perverse.
To stage a play of such seriousness and stark realism is a very difficult task. As the large crowd turned up that evening for the play perhaps they were not really looking forward to a larger than life dramatisation but a simple enactment of the play which keeps the flesh of the story in place and holds some semblance to their individual perceptions of it.
Iyengar's troupe somewhere let down these expectations and for the most parts was a disappointment. One of major follies that could be pointed out in the staged performance would be the misinterpretation of The Horse. Where the soul of the actual play lay in the "nakedness" of the horses. Their minimalism, bearing symbols of complete vulnerability and the desires for absolute freedom, in the performance were depicted with such decoration, colour and granduar that it made them look superficial.
The power and grimness of the long monologues and dialogues were diluted by poor diction and speech delivery of the actors and the interfering background music.
The story seemed to lose its intensity amidst the various dance sequences (although done beautifully) and in the end looked like a pop pysho drama.
