⋙ [PDF] Gratis Equus Penguin Plays Peter Shaffer 0051488011002 Books

Equus Penguin Plays Peter Shaffer 0051488011002 Books

Download As PDF : Equus Penguin Plays Peter Shaffer 0051488011002 Books

Equus Penguin Plays Peter Shaffer 0051488011002 Books

So happy to add this great play to my collection. Even better when explored the second or third time. You will love it.


Tags : Equus (Penguin Plays) [Peter Shaffer] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Tony Award-winning drama deals with a psychiatrist's exploration of the psyche of a troubled seventeen-year-old boy who senselessly and systematically blinds six horses.,Peter Shaffer,Equus (Penguin Plays),Penguin Books,0140260706,European - English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh,Drama,Drama European English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh,Drama texts, plays,English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh,Fiction Literary,Plays,Plays Drama

Equus Penguin Plays Peter Shaffer 0051488011002 Books Reviews

Peter Shaffer, Equus (Penguin Drama, 1973)

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Equus was contrasting the play itself to the blurb on the back, which talked about the play's theme being how convenience and falling away from religion led to the decline of modern civilization. Interesting because, read a different way, Equus has as one of its subtexts a rather blistering attack on religion. Something to mull over.

But the important bit is, how's the work itself? The simple answer it's Peter Shaffer. That should be all you need to know. (For those unaware, Shaffer was also responsible for Amadeus, the play turned into the equally wonderful 1984 Best Picture Oscar winner, and the equally wonderful Five-Finger Discount, the film version of which is unfortunately impossible to find in America.) When you read Shaffer, you are going to find unforgettable characters in intriguing situations, and that's exactly what you get here. The protagonist, Dysart, is a therapist at a mental hospital. His newest charge, sixteen-year-old Alan Strang, has been sent to the institution after blinding six horses at the stable where he'd worked. Dysart's job is, of course, to find out what was going through Strang's mind as he did it. Getting to the answer requires talking to most of those surrounding the boy's life, piecing together what caused Strang's mind to snap (and how long he's been insane), and finally, figuring out the boy's worldview.

It's gripping stuff. About the only thing that can be said against the play (and this is really a niggle, at best) is that some of the minor characters, who by rights should have been major characters, are two-dimensional and could have used a bit of fleshing out. That said, however, Equus is a fantastic piece of work, and well deserves its lofty reputation. ****
I'm going to be honest. For a while I thought the only reason this play was popular was because it was "the one where Daniel Radcliffe gets naked." As crazy it sounds, actually opening a book can make you feel a lot differently about it, and I certainly did after reading Peter Shaffer's Equus. Is it there still a boy who rides horses nude? Absolutely. But it's not what you might have heard. This isn't a play about sex, so much as it is intimacy.

At the heart of this story is Alan Strang, a disturbed young man whose obsession with horses has caused him to commit a horrible act of violence the blinding of six horses in the stable where he works. Treating him is psychiatrist Martin Dysart, who, as we watch him interact with Alan, his parents, and those in the community, works to make sense of the events leading up to the act, and the mystery of why someone would do such a thing. As he does, he finds himself submerging deeper and deeper into the world not of a violent, crazy person, but a boy capable of great compassion and warmth; a boy who's problem we soon realize is not solely in his head, but also in the discord he feels between the detached feelings everyone else has toward horses and the intense tenderness he feels toward them.

In another life, Shaffer could have easily rocked the detective fiction genre. It's not every day someone can take a heady physiatrist narrative and turn it into a suspenseful psychodrama. Using flashback, hypnosis, and re-enactment, Shaffer is able to show us how the process of unraveling the mystery of another person can be just as thrilling and intense as solving a who-done-it.

At the same time, this isn't just a story about a strange act of violence. It's about people everywhere; it's about what what we've pressed down, and what we've become. There is a very relevant message here about our restraint towards things. Or rather, our muting of how we feel toward the world around us. As Dysart says, "Can you think of anything worse one can do to anybody than take away their worship?" For Alan, the horse he rides isn't just one horse. It's God of Horses, the Holy, the Mighty. It's Equus. He rides horses bare because it is part of his ritual of worship, his attempt to try and become one. And what, Shaffer asks, is so wrong about such a ritual?

As he explains to his colleague in an attempt to defend Alan's behavior, "I only know it's the core of his life. What else has he got? Think about him. He can hardly read. He knows no physics or engineering to make the world real for him. No paintings to show him how others have enjoyed it. No music except television jingles. No history except tales from a desperate mother. No friends. Not one kid to give him a joke, or make him know himself more moderately. He's a modern citizen for whom society doesn't exist. He lives one hour every three weeks, howling in a mist. And after the service kneels to a slave who stands over him obviously and unthrowably his master. With my body I thee worship! --Many men have less vital with their wives" (79).

It doesn't matter that this play was written in 1973. Shaffer's message is clear the world is becoming colder. It's not the way we meant to go, but our way of relating with each other is becoming increasingly distanced. Even religion, something that if you ask me, should be pretty personal, has become artificial. It's still an attempt at transcending, true, but at the risk of becoming for so many, nothing more than an appointed time in an appointed place. Sunday at 9 Church. An hour and a half, and you're free to go. Nor do we allow ourselves the spontaneous ecstasy of smaller holies Rain on the Window or Warm Sip of Starbucks Coffee, or Dog's Sweet Fur. We need to learn to appreciate things again, Shaffer tells us. We need to holler in the wind, to participate. We need more worship.

When you think about it, it's pretty impressive that a play written nearly forty years ago about horses of all things, can register on such a real level with modern-day readers. Even teenagers are getting caught up in this play--and for reasons that have nothing to do with Daniel Radcliffe losing the wizarding robes...losing all robes... (all right, maybe a little). That said, while Shaffer's play about a boy who likes horses must be appreciated for its unique ability to tap into the pain and longings of hooded teens with I-Pads, that is not to say the work is without its antiquated moments. At points Dysart's monologues are so saturated with symbols, they feel more like an attempt at his own Greek tragedy than dialogue coming out of a person's mouth. Maybe this is just to capture the extent to which education has trained our psychiatrist protagonist, or maybe Shaffer is, in a certain sense, trying to give us the feel of a Dionysian chorus. Whatever the reason, this style definitely has its limits. It conjures some pretty images, but doesn't promise we return from them more awake.

Similarly, Shaffer's message does start to feel redundant at points modernity is alienating, normal is harmful, madness is healthy, the bestial is passion, etc. At points he also idealizes Alan's behavior to the extreme, giving him the enlightened aura of a Greek God who knows better than everyone else, rather than recognizing him for who he is a confused kid who's still trying to figure out what the hell he's doing. Shaffer also loves coming back to the repressiveness of the modern-day family. Alan's parents are allowed personalities, but only to a certain extent. But most frustrating about this play, Shaffer offers no real solution. Indeed his idea of a solution is Alan shouting in pain after his final flashback, then being put to sleep for the night by Dysart. In this way, Shaffer only ever gives us two extremes either an intense, but unstable way of living or walking around like some repressed automaton.

But such a future envisions no middle ground. As Shaffer writes in his final monologue with Alan's sleeping, drugged body next to him "When that's done, I'll set him on a nice mini-scooter and send him puttering off into the Normal world where animals are treated properly made extinct, or put into servitude, or tethered all their lives in dim light...You won't gallop anymore, Alan. Horses will be quite safe. You'll save your pennies every week, till you can change that scooter for a car, and put the odd 50p on the gee-gees, quite forgetting that they were ever anything more to you than bearers of little profits and little losses. You will, however, be without pain. More or less completely without pain" (109). As powerful as this passage is, I can't help but think, sad...but where does it leave us? The modern world is destructive, I get it. But what then? What next? It's not that everyone wants to be Normal people scootering about in our metal metropolis, betting on animals like they don't exist. But what's the alternative? Can't intimacy and modernity come to some kind of arrangement? Isn't there some way to live with animals in a way that's with them?

As exciting as this passage is in its screw-the-system energy, there's only so far that gets you. I mean, really, what comes from condemning the Normal, modern world? What are we without it? Facts are facts, this is what we have. Maybe it's too fast and bright at times and in some places, people smell a bit funny, but in the end, it's not so bad. I think at some deep level, Shaffer recognizes this, and does acknowledge that even if a distanced way of relating to animals and people is the norm, it doesn't have to stay that way. While earlier on in the play, he idealizes a kind of pulling away from all roots ("I bet all cowboys are orphans!"), at the end he seems to recognize that change must not come from outside but within; from whatever generation is looking to lead. As Dysart says, "I need--more desperately than my children need me--a way of seeing in the dark. What way is this?" (110). Perhaps then, for Shaffer, the solution lies in that very question "What way is this?" Not finding a way through the numbed-out Normal, so much as wanting a way to.
I have to say that the movie is so much better than the play which feels more like a rough draft. The play has many ideas that were incorporated in the film, so kudos to Sidney Lumet for translating them onto the silver screen. Of course, Peter Firth is just brilliant as Alan Strang. He owned that role. Richard Burton is sublime as well. All in all, you can do no wrong reading Peter Shaffer's play Equus, but it's easily blown away by the film.
This play first came to my attention when I received information about Daniel Radcliffe starring in it this spring in London. I decided to read the play when I found that the summary appealed to me. I was not disappointed with my choice- it is really quite intriguing trying to understand Alan's crime, and then later to find it is really about the psychiatrist's internal conflict between right and wrong.
Love the play the book is ok, it is old but can stand more time, have no problem with it.
Equus is an outstanding play. Every page is enthralling as you come to uncover the complexities of Alan's sheltered, religious upbringing and the intense, misguided passion that he is not likely to feel again.
A very strange play. That's about all I can say to sum this play up. Very strange and disturbing.
So happy to add this great play to my collection. Even better when explored the second or third time. You will love it.