Equus review: Noah Valentine and the question nobody else is asking

The horses are men. That is the production's most honest choice and its most unsettling one. Six of them, bare-chested and streaked with black, sit at the back of the Menier's thrust stage and watch. They do not move yet. They do not need to.

The charge between Alan and those bodies is not subtext. It never was. Six men, bare-chested and beautiful under Paul Pyant's lighting, and the audience receives them warmly, appreciatively, in a way that feels almost comfortable. That comfort is the question. What was once dangerous has become handsome. Whether that is a loss or simply fifty years passing is something this production raises without quite answering, which may be the most honest thing it does.

Toby Stephens plays psychiatrist Martin Dysart as a man who has been good at his job for so long he has started to resent it. He is the play's settled world made flesh: rational, certain, empty underneath. Amanda Abbington's magistrate Hesther is the one person in the room who seems genuinely sure she is doing the right thing. It is a small performance and a necessary one. Stephens is stronger in the second act than the first, and the moment when he finally admits his envy of Alan's passion carries real weight. You just have to wait for it.

Noah Valentine is the reason to go. As Alan Strang he enters closed off and tense, and then something opens. The story comes out in pieces: a childhood ride on a stranger's horse, a bedroom poster that replaced a religious icon, weekend shifts at a stable that became a private altar. His awakening happens with these men, not with Bella Aubin's Jill, the girl the play gives him as a way out, and when he tries to take that way out everything falls apart. Colin Mace and Emma Cunniffe as Alan's parents find real depth in roles the play could easily flatten. A father with no religion and a mother with too much, pulling in opposite directions while their son disappears between them. Valentine never plays Alan as a case to be solved. The tenderness and the horror arrive together and he holds both. It is a star-making performance.

None of it would land without James Cousins' movement work, which is the production's most distinctive achievement. The traditional metal horse heads are gone. What replaces them is bodies alone, precise and unhurried, six men coming together into one creature with real weight and presence. Ed Mitchell as Nugget leads the ensemble with something that makes the relationship between boy and horse feel completely believable and deeply strange at the same time. Adam Cork's sound runs underneath all of it, quiet until it isn't.

At nearly three hours the bench seating makes itself known, and there are moments in the second act where the play's structure shows its age. But the question at the centre does not. Whether a life without total devotion is worth living, even when devotion is what destroyed you, has no clean answer now any more than it did in 1973. Lindsay Posner doesn't try to find one. He holds the play still and lets it look at you.

The Menier run closes 4 July, before transferring to Theatre Royal Bath. See it while you can.

Photo by Manuel Harlan

The Menier run closes 4 July, before transferring to Theatre Royal Bath. See it while you can.

Tickets available here

Director: Lindsay Posner

‍Writer: Peter Shaffer

‍Cast: Toby Stephens, Noah Valentine, Ed Mitchell, Amanda Abbington, Colin Mace, Emma Cunniffe, Bella Aubin, Luke Hodkinson, Aristide Lyons, Zach Parkin, Tommi Sutton, Moses Ward

‍Production: Menier Chocolate Factory / Theatre Royal Bath

‍Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes (including interval)

‍Rating: 4.0/5