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Archive for February, 2019

Q&A with Movement Director, Shelley Maxwell 

Posted on: February 28th, 2019 by ettEditor

What is one of your earliest theatre memories? 

As a child growing up in Jamaica, I was first exposed to theatre through the world of dance. I would both attend and participate in dance concerts, formal and informal, and fell in love with the feeling of journeying into a place that was beyond the everyday and was instead some place quite magical. 

What was your route into the industry? 

Dance was my chosen route into the world of theatre making. Though it’s debatable as to whether I chose it or it chose me. I studied and honed my craft as a performer and maker in that world, later making my way on stage into musical theatre and subsequently into movement direction. 

What advice would you give to emerging artists? 

I think following one’s passion is always a positive attribute and by doing that you guarantee that there is a constant desire and fire to keep pushing forward. I believe having a strong sense of self-belief and resilience is helpful as an artist, as art is subjective. You can’t please everyone but you can strive to remain true to yourself. 

What has your journey been like from performer to movement director? 

For me it was somewhat a natural progression as, from a very young age, I was practicing the craft of choreography in the world of contemporary dance. I balanced this alongside my performance career and when I decided to retire from stage an opportunity came my way to delve into the world of movement direction. The big difference being I was now working with actors instead of dancers and the huge revelation for me was how much I absolutely loved doing it. The rest as they say is history. 

Who or what inspires you? 

I am constantly being inspired by those I work with. Directors, actors, voice coaches, fight directors – the list is extensive. Every job gives me a new insight into different methods of practice. It’s an eye opening and humbling journey where I get to admire the talents of my peers which in turn keeps pushing me to strive to be better. 

What advice would you give to someone starting out as a Movement Director? 

I think the idea of growing your network is essential. If people don’t know who you are then THEY DONT KNOW WHO YOU ARE. So working on projects whether assisting or shadowing is great in terms of a learning experience but also in terms of putting your face out there. 

What has it been like working on Equus? 

Equus has proven to be a very collaborative experience. The director is very open to exploration and the actors have followed suit by also being very active in the process of devising. It’s been wonderful stepping into the rehearsal room each day not really knowing what might be conjured up. 

What’s next for you? 

Aah the infamous ‘what’s next for you’ question. I’ll answer that more from the stand point of human being and less so from movement director. On my to do list after opening night are my three Rs: Rest, Relaxation and some Reading. 

Divine, Darling! Personal reflections on Peter Shaffer and Equus

Posted on: February 28th, 2019 by ettEditor

Dan Rebellato Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London  

Peter Shaffer is often described as a spiritual dramatist, someone who digs under the surface of the modern world to retrieve our lost pagan impulses, our neglected connection with divinity. And maybe that’s true, but isn’t it time to acknowledge him as our great lost queer playwright? 

The image of heterosexual marriage in the play is uniformly bleak and unerotic, from Strang’s uncommunicative parents, through Dysart’s briskly hygienic marriage, to Jill’s man-hating mother, and Strang’s erectile dysfunction. Meanwhile, the central axis of the play is between Dysart and Strang and what a queer pairing they make: the former is, by his own account, a ‘finicky, critical husband’, who hasn’t kissed his wife in years, prefers to spend his evenings looking at pictures of athletes, and longs for someone with whom he can share his Greek passions. Strang meanwhile, after a decisive encounter with a man on the sea front, has developed an imagined sexual ritual where he takes a ‘manbit’ in his mouth, and becomes stiff as he yells for his divine lover to ‘take me’. Equus is a play of fetishized masculinity: of cowboys, harnesses, straps, chains, leather, muscle and sweat. 

Strang notes approvingly of his father that ‘he hates ladies and gents like me’, which flutters semantically and queerly between three thoughts: that he is rejecting his mother’s preference for a prim vision of sexlessly noble courtship; that he is rejecting heterosexuality altogether; and that Strang himself is, in some way, both lady and gent. Prior to his brutal mutilation of the horses, he has a revelation of a world of phallic, priapic men:  ‘I kept looking at all the people in the street. They were mostly men coming out of pubs. I suddenly thought – they all do it! All of them! … They’re not just Dads – they’re people with pricks!’ The words sound as aroused as they do horrified 

Dysart admits to being jealous of the boy’s passion and is not the only Shaffer protagonist to feel this. There’s also Pizarro in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Salieri in Amadeus, the eponymous Yonadab, Philip in The Gift of the Gorgon – all of them in erotic thrall to some divine alpha male (almost literally alpha: Alan, Atahuallpah, Amadeus…). 

Shaffer’s theatricality is part of his dance with forbidden sexuality: although the story sets up a world of hidden feelings and erotic secrecy, the fluidity of the play opens everything up to scrutiny: his narrators (Old Martin, Dysart, Salieri, Yonadab) both conjure worlds magically before us and seem oddly detached from them. Emotionally, it is never quite clear to me if Shaffer’s narrators are inside their plays looking out, or outside their plays looking in. 

In 1988, theatre scholar Vera Gottlieb wrote a ferocious denunciation of ‘Thatcher’s Theatre’ with the accusing subtitle ‘– After Equus’, arguing that Shaffer’s play marks a capitulation to the forces of mysticism and irrationality. Of course, that’s what Dysart says he believes but methinks the doctor doth protest too much. We’re not obliged to accept his reading of events. Gottlieb’s criticism rests on the suggestion that a play like Equus turns away from social reality towards spiritual mystery; but we can read the play differently as presenting that mystical retreat to us and allowing us to understand it. 

The play is built around an intricate series of substitutions: a painting of Christ replaced by a picture of a horse which becomes overlaid with a real horse which is substituted for another horse, just as some key words virally transform in the boy’s imagination (PRINCE becoming PRANCE becoming PRANCUS then FLANKUS then SPANKUS then SPUNKUS, LEGWUS, NECKWUS, FLECKWUS, EQUUS and EK). These substitutions only partly interweave sexuality and worship, but they also draw more broadly on the culture: in that EK, we hear not just the horse-God but brand names from now-forgotten television advertisements in the published, original text: ROBEX, CROYDEX, VOLEX. Consumer society swirls through the play in television jingles and the father’s socialistic prohibitions; his repeated motif is ‘if you receive my meaning’, cleverly amended here to ‘if you take my meaning’ – the phrase equivocating uncertainly between receiving and stealing, as if understanding is a kind of theft. Strang(e) meanings circulate in the black market of this play, like the flows of desire or commodity-production. Equus does not turn away from society towards the irrational but shows us the irrational as the wreckage in a world in transition between the worship of  God and the worship of money. 

Further substitutions takes us from God, to the Father, to the Doctor. Transference of this kind is a familiar enough trope in psychoanalysis, but there’s more to this than meets the eye. Dysart has a recurring dream in which he’s killing children in a sacrificial ritual. Later, he connects this with his role as a therapist and the way he describes his work makes it sound uncannily like gay conversion therapy, insisting that in his work he has taken young people and ‘cut from them parts of individuality repugnant to this God’ to make them ‘Normal’, explaining: ‘The Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health, and I am his Priest’. Dysart is claiming something bigger: that the practice of psychiatry is itself a technology of social control. And given Dysart’s own struggles, we might plausibly conclude that ultimately what he has sacrificed is his own homosexuality.  

In this, Equus was bang on trend. It came after a decade of anti-psychiatry debates that argued exactly this. Gay rights activists interrupted the 1970 APA (American Psychiatric Association) in San Francisco, in protest at the Association’s stigmatisation of lesbians and gay men as ‘ill’. While the play continued at the National, French social theorist Michel Foucault was beginning a lecture course at the Collège de France on ‘Psychiatric Power’ which would inform two of his most famous books: in Discipline and Punish, Foucault argues that the early nineteenth century invented a new method of social control in the Panopticon, which created docile citizens by opening them up perpetually to the gaze of power (‘I see you! I see you!’ Equus tells Strang. ‘Always! Everywhere! Forever!). In the first volume of the History of Sexuality, Foucault suggests that power does not control sexuality by silencing it but by forcing it to speak (‘you have to speak the truth at all costs,’ Dysart tells Strang. ‘And all of it’). In December 1973, six months after Strang blinded those Panoptical horses, the American Psychiatric Association famously removed homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorder. 

Equus is a much misunderstood play and this production, with its taut eroticism and sleek linguistic power, is a chance to see it for what it is: a profoundly queer play about the political complexities of forbidden desire. 

 

An Act of Violence: A Psychiatrist’s Perspective on Equus

Posted on: February 28th, 2019 by ettEditor

Dr Peter Misch 
Consultant Adolescent Forensic Psychiatrist 

One of the central themes of Equus is that it examines and questions the mental health of children and young people who act out horrific, sadistic or seemingly twisted violent behaviour. This theme is central to the professional role of child and adolescent forensic psychiatrists such as ourselves and within a few lines of the play starting I found myself intrigued. 

Equus was written and informed at a time when the boundaries of mental health and ill-health were being challenged by writers such as RD Laing, shifting from a medical deterministic view of human behaviour to a systemic psycho-social approach and Equus remains as relevant now as when it was first written. 

The role of the adolescent forensic psychiatrist in these cases is not to determine guilt or innocence; this is the role of the Court. It is to ascertain an understanding of the motivations underpinning the behaviour and advise about both treatment strategies for the young person and about future risks to others and how best to manage these risks. 

Engaging a young person in this type of forensic psychiatric assessment is a two-way process that inevitably requires give-and-take between doctor and patient. It requires respect by the psychiatrist for the young person and an interest in that individual that extends beyond the violent act, combined with compassion tempered by honesty about the non-acceptability of the violence. 

In order to build up a level of trust and engagement so that the patient’s feelings and thoughts can be fully shared, some young people need some control in the relationship. As is reflected in the play, this may require some personal disclosure from the psychiatrist. 

In order to gain an understanding of the young person’s relationships with their parents, teachers, their peers and any intimate partners, an assessment inevitably extends to interviewing other informants. A young person’s interests, their hobbies and increasingly their online relationships also inform an assessment. 

The play illustrates some of the multiple dilemmas that can arise for both the ‘patient’ and the forensic psychiatrist of engaging in the assessment process.  

Whilst a sadistic act of violence by a young person evokes both horror and revulsion in others and sympathy for the victim, the violent act may well have a very different ‘meaning’ for the patient. In some cases the violent act may have been experienced as being empowering by the young person. Removing this sense of power by providing insight for a young person in this situation can result in a depressive reaction and if this is not understood and the patient supported, this can result in suicide.  

Extreme cases involving violence inevitably have some degree of emotional impact on the assessing psychiatrist and other professionals, especially where relationships between the patient or victims have been established. 

Compared to men, children (and women) who commit sadistic crimes tend to be demonised by English society, both the press and the Judicial system. England and Wales has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world and for children, the age of criminal responsibility set at 10 years of age, one of the lowest. 

Equus highlights that there is no simple answer in these cases, but in effect, multiple victims, including the guilty perpetrator. English society has a great compassion for domesticated animals such as horses, which makes the wish for revenge and punishment seem a logical response.  

Hesther Salmon, the female magistrate, in the play takes a different approach to her bench and seeks understanding and care for the offender, Alan Strang. Not all forensic psychiatrists take this approach and some use their skills to ensure long custodial sentences. Whilst it is my professional duty to protect society from violence and recognise the central importance of addressing the impact on victims of crime, including the need for punishment, I am behind the magistrate, Hesther, and psychiatrist, Martin Dysart, in Equus.

Interview with Ned Bennett

Posted on: February 10th, 2019 by ettEditor

 Ned Bennet, Director of Equus

What is Equus about? 

Among other things, Equus is an incredibly sophisticated, visceral exploration of why people commit violent acts.  

We are told at the beginning, much like a true crime podcast, what has happened; a boy (Alan Strang) has stabbed six horse’s eyes out. And then it is as much about why he did it as it is about how this case affects the physiatrist (Martin Dysart). 

Peter Shaffer said he didn’t think Equus had a genre. What genre do you think it is? 

What’s special about Equus is that is goes between different genres. At one point you think you can pin it down as a ‘Why dunnit?’ thriller and the next moment it becomes this profound philosophical meditation on religion and society. The play examines how religious worship can be transferred into someone’s own idea of what a deity is to them.  

The next minute it becomes a theatrical, expressive, mercurial beast. The script manages to go between something incredibly sophisticated and cerebral and something visceral, exciting and suspenseful. 

Why did you want to this project? 

I’m fascinated how the play explodes open our understanding of our primal drives. One of the central conceits of the play is that if someone exhibits what might be described as abnormal behaviour, are they to be listened to or controlled? To this end Dysart falls under the R.D. Laing school of anti-psychiatry; these questions were widely discussed when the play was first produced in the early 70s and feel still resonant now.  

How did it feel to take on such a well-known play? 

It was exciting to be able to draw on the rich history of how the production was put together originally and marry this with this our creative team’s personal response to the text.  The original stage directions contain a mix of practical notes and poetic expressions of how the play was first articulated. 

The play relies heavily on movement direction, what was it like collaborating with Shelley Maxwell? And how did the cast prepare for their roles as horses? 

It was joyous collaborating with Shelley Maxwell, she has such a rich vocabulary of a wide range of movement and choreographic styles, coupled with an extraordinarily lateral imagination. The guiding principle for this work was investigating how Alan Strang’s relationship with Equus shifts with his endowment of Nugget the horse and Equus the God. We workshopped a multitude of versions of the horses and did the obligatory visit to some stables to observe, groom and muck out the horses.  

Did any of your previous work prepare you for the process of directing Equus

When I started out directing I worked part-time for as a Learning Support Assistant in Primary and Secondary Schools with young people with Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties. I drew on these experiences in trying to understand these characters.  

What’s next after Equus

I’m looking to create an outright horror play!