Equus (theater)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The following important information is missing from this article or section:
Interpretation approach, characters, drama design, impact history.
Help Wikipedia by researching and pasting it .

Equus ( lat. , Horse ') is a play by Peter Shaffer from 1973. The German-language transmission of Wolfgang Mandt was published in 1974.

content

The play begins with the reflection of the psychiatrist Martin Dysart on the case of 17-year-old Alan Strang as a framework. For at first inexplicable reasons, the youngster gouged out the eyes of six horses in a riding stable where he was employed. Mediated by Dysart as the “narrator”, who reconstructs and comments on the case from his memory, the psychoanalytic treatment of the boy, the previous history and the incident itself as an internal plot are staged on stage.

Alan appears disturbed about the first treatment. Dysart, who feels exhausted and dissatisfied and finds himself in a deep professional and existential crisis, can only slowly gain his trust: The boy's family and individual background gradually becomes clear: his mother, who comes from “better backgrounds”, is rather religious and based on the norms and values ​​of the upper middle class, while his father, who worked his way up, is atheist and socialist . Alan grew up in this tension between the different parental values ​​and educational concepts; From an early age he felt a fascination for images of horses, which he overloaded and mixed up with religious ideas. In Alan's perception, the horse's eyes and the facial expression of the suffering Christ merge ; he develops an almost religious relationship to horses in general, which takes shape in personified form in the imagination of the horse god Equus. Alan increasingly dominated him as a religious authority. Alan's childlike experience on the beach is of particular importance. Fascinated by the mythological idea of ​​a personal unity of horse and rider from the stories of his mother, the six-year-old Alan experiences his first ride on a horse as lustful mastery of an excessively large and strong creature. However, his father tears little Alan from the horse of the young man who had let him mount. When Alan later found a job in a riding stable after an unpopular job in an electronics store that his father had arranged for him, he used every opportunity to secretly ride out at night. He has no friends or contacts in his age group. The meeting with Jill, who also works in the horse stable, means his first relationship with his peers. Jill's attempt to seduce Alan fails, however, as he feels that the eyes of the horses and Equus, his horse god, are watching him. After Jill has left him alone in the stable after the failed sexual approach, he blinds the horses in a violent blow.

literature

  • Lothar Cerny: Peter Shaffer · Equus . In: Rainer Lengeler: English Literature of the Present 1971-1975 . Bagel Verlag, Düsseldorf 1977, ISBN 3-513-02226-3 , pp. 157-169.
  • Hanspeter Dörfel and Bärbel Dietz: Identity: Search and Crisis in Dramatic Interaction (Peter Shaffer. Equus. 1973) . In: Horst Groene and Berthold Schik (eds.): The modern drama in English lessons in upper secondary level · Basics - interpretations - course projects . Scriptor Verlag Königstein / Ts. 1980, ISBN 3-589-20743-4 , pp. 161-183.

Award

The first performance of the play on Broadway with Anthony Hopkins as psychiatrist Martin Dysart won the 1975 Tony Award for Best Play .

Adaptations (selection)

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See also Lothar Cerny: Peter Shaffer · Equus , p. 157, and Hanspeter Dörfel and Bärbel Dietz: Identity: Search and Crisis in Dramatic Interaction (Peter Shaffer. Equus. 1973) , p. 162, 164 f. and 167 f.