Equus

by Peter Shaffer
Loft Theatre Company, March 1990
Director: Richard Drinkwater

Although somewhat old (at 29) to be playing Peter Shaffer’s 17-year-old anti-hero Alan Strang, the obsessive and tortured youth who blinds six horses, this was a role I fought to play. It is still, to this day, the work I am most proud of.

Richard Moore played Nugget, the leader of the horses.

Bob Harper played Martin Dysart, the psychiatrist.

Dictating my thoughts into an (imaginary) tape recorder as Dysart listens.

Jill Mason, the stable girl with whom Alan begins to forge a relationship, was played by Annette Brill.

The stable scene. After Alan tries, unsuccessfully, to have sex with Jill, he cannot bear the knowledge that the horses – his gods – have witnessed his shame, and puts out their eyes with a metal hoof pick. Here, I approach Nugget with the pick concealed behind my back.

(This was the first occasion on which I was called upon to bare all on stage – something which has since become something of a habit, with me getting everything off in Privates on Parade, The Full Monty and The Memory of Water, and mooning the audience in Noises Off. Dennis Pennis’s famous question to Demi Moore could probably with some justification also be asked of me...)