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Thatcher's Theatre or, After Equus

Vera Gottlieb
New Theatre Quarterly / Volume 4 / Issue 14 / May 1988, pp 99 - 104
DOI: 10.1017/S0266464X00002633, Published online: 15 January 2009

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0266464X00002633

How to cite this article:
Vera Gottlieb (1988). Thatcher's Theatre or, After Equus. New Theatre Quarterly, 4, pp 99-104
doi:10.1017/S0266464X00002633
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Vera Gottlieb

Thatcher's Theatre - or, After 'Equus'

A dozen years after the political and theatrical watershed of 1956 came those further
shifts in social thinking of 1968, which were also reflected in major changes on the
theatrical scene. Another twelve years on, any theatre people who were expecting such
a collision of events in 1980 appeared to be waiting in vain. Yet, in retrospect, the
impact of that first full year of a new kind of Conservative government can be seen as
no less decisive, though its effects on the theatrical scene are only now beginning to
make a kind of negative sense. Here, Vera Gottlieb argues that the tone of 'Thatcher's
theatre' was already being set by such earlier plays as Peter Shaffer's Equus. in which
she detects both the despair of rational solutions and the willing subjection to
supposedly implacable forces that have since become characteristic of our national
theatre as of our national mood. Vera Gottlieb, who is Principal Lecturer in Drama at
Goldsmiths' College, University of London, is the author of Chekhov and the Vaudeville
(Cambridge, 1982), is presently collaborating with Peter Holland on a study of
Stanislavsky as director, and has been co-author and director of Red Earth (Hampstead,
1985) and Waterloo Road (Young Vic Studio. 1987).

IN NOVEMBER 1986 a new production of Jean gods have their gods. We have ours, they have
Cocteau's The Infernal Machine opened at the theirs' (Anubis, The Infernal Machine, Act 2).
Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. In his programme
The result, as the Young Soldier says, is that
note the director, Simon Callow, wrote: 'In the 'These things are beyond us, I'm afraid', and the
face of AIDS, nuclear war, and starvation it Voice explains that the whole point of the play
becomes harder to dismiss [Cocteau's] vision of is to demonstrate 'one of the most perfect
life as a trap devised by a remorseless divinity'. machines constructed by the infernal gods for
A leitmotif of the play is the compassionate but the mathematical destruction of a mortal'. The
impotent cry of the goddess Nemesis: 'Poor, play was first performed in Paris in 1934, the
poor, poor men'.
year in which Adolf Hitler became Chancellor
But Nemesis, like the mortals, is 'caught in of the Third Reich.
the hellish machine of the gods'. The refrain is
More recently, in 1973, the year of the world
not dissimilar from the one in Strindberg's economic crisis, Peter Shaffer's Equus became
A Dream Play, written in 1901: 'Mankind is to perhaps the most popular 'serious' play of the
be pitied', says the Daughter of the God Indra, decade.1 To refuse, as many do, to take the play
as she ascends back up to heaven, leaving us seriously on the grounds that it is a 'bad' play
mortals in the manure-heap of the earth.
does not explain its popularity, particularly
amongst younger theatregoers. Part of its
appeal has been explained by Walter Kerr,
Beyond our Control
writing in the New York Times on 2 September
The ideology of the two plays is also similar: 1973:
human beings are at the mercy of cruel and
remorseless forces, fates, or circumstances // there is one thing more than another that a
beyond our control. We are, consequently, both contemporary playwright would like to do, it is to
to be pitied - and rendered impotent. In neither make a myth. We feel a desperate need these days
play is the nature of these 'inevitable forces' for new icons, images, clothed symbols that will help
really analyzed or explained: instead, they are us come to terms with the 'dark cave of the psyche',
mythologized. The gods themselves are not the cave that thousands of years of reasoning
free agents: 'mystery has its mysteries, the haven't quite lighted after all....
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Briefly, Equus appears to assert that a boy who

blinds horses by driving stakes through their
eyes is more in contact with 'the spirit of
mystery', with reality, with 'Life', than the
psychiatrist who treats him - for whom 'the
rational life is a barren life'. Shaffer himself
made explicit the political context and motivation of the play in an interview in The Times
on 28 April 1980:

As in Equus, so in Wildfire, the psychiatrist

collapses before a belief in mystery and 'god',
glimpsed through his criminal patient, which can
only be envied. As Dysart says at the end of
Equus:
/ need more desperately than my children need
me-a way of seeing in the dark. What way is
this... ? What dark is this? / cannot call it ordained
of God: I can't get that far. I will, however, pay it
so much homage....

The boy in Equus grew out of a feeling that for a

lot of people in suburban England life has gone flat.
It is what one heard on all sides ' England is not
what it used to be, life is savourless, people feel The Cult of Deviation
frustrated by its relentless prosaicism'.

Out of this 'prosaicism', Shaffer creates a boy,

Alan, with 'a passionate capacity for worship';
his parents the mother, a deep religious
believer, the father some kind of' Communist';
and a psychiatrist, Dysart, who is 'the spokesman for normality, an unhappily married
man, his sex life with a dull and frigid wife
completely atrophied, and his kicks coming
from the perusal of illustrated tomes on Greek
art'. 2
The play glorifies the pagan and the primitive,
creating a 'myth' out of sickness - a viewpoint
which relates to R. D. Laing's once fashionable
belief that patients' psychotic productions
should be respected as creative acts, 'as higher,
more authentic forms of "truth"."' The answer
to 'prosaicism' would seem to lie in the cult of
primitivism and the rejection of the rational
a philosophy not dissimilar from that previously
voiced by, for example, D. H. Lawrence in The

The dedication and surrender is to some 'dark

force' - taught by a boy who blinds horses in a
primitive-erotic state, and a woman who
commits arson and patricide. The ideology of
Equus and Wildfire is similar to that of A Dream
Play and The Infernal Machine. In all four plays

we are given what Brecht called 'a sense of

magic hands bearing us off from a world we
cannot master, and have to give up '.4 Audiences
were profoundly moved by Equus (as David
Hare put it, as 'profoundly moved as by any
truthful thing'), but part of what struck a chord
in audiences was the surrender to 'dark forces'
and abdication of responsibility. Dysart's
capitulation to his patient's mysticism and
primitivism was, for the audience, an important
collusion which justifies in us a similar collusion.
In the British theatre of recent years, catharsis
has frequently become collusion. 'Evil' or 'dark'
forces are experienced as located outside the
self - and thus the individual feels unable to
control
those forces. Part of the appeal of 'law
Plumed Serpent and Kangaroo, or Knut Hamsun in
and
order'
is that a strong external force is seen
Pan.
as
capable
of
controlling the evil 'out there'. So
An American play, dealing with similar
both
the
'bad'
and the capacity to control it are
themes, also opened in November 1986 projected outwards, involving an abdication of
Richard Nash's Wildfire, at the Phoenix Theatre.
responsibility. As Gerhart Hauptmann phrased
Once again, as Michael Billington put it in The
it in Germany in 1932: 'If only life would
Guardian on 20 November, 'rationality is...left
demand no more solutions from us.'
on its back on the canvas'. The play takes place
The reappearance now of this subject and
in a New York detention-room. A svelte
ideology
is not accidental. Human feelings are
Manhattan PR person, Bess Garrison (played by
as
historically
conditioned as other human
Diana Rigg), has committed arson and murder
activities.
Faced
with the crisis and upheaval of
by burning down an East Side brownstone
social
and
industrial
decline; responding with
containing her 73-year-old father. David Benresentment
against
both 'big corporations'
jamin, a Jewish psychiatrist employed by the
and
the
'big
unions';
tired of the rhetoric and
court, is required to discover whether she is
jargon of 'the left', and of the failure of
mad or sane.

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successive Labour governments 'to deliver':

many non-aligned voters have responded to
crisis by putting their faith in 'law and order',
by feeling the need for the imposition of
authority from above.
The role of the 'Iron Lady' has thus been
greeted with relief by many people, and the
reactionary populism of 'free market, strong
state, iron times' and the 'return to Victorian
values' has seemed to offer an alternative to
the chaos of the old social democracy. So,
throughout the 1970s, the popular mood shifted
decisively against the Left, as Snowy says in
Alan

Bleasdale's

Boys

from

the

Blackstuff

(1982):
It was easy to be a socialist when I was growin up
in the 'sixties, an' even f most of the 'seventies.
Everyone was a friggin socialist then. It was
fashionable. But it's not now
Every thins gone
sour, everyone's lockin the door, turnin the other
cheek, lookin after number one

The cult hero of today is Rambo, the vigilante

who single-handedly defends his world against
the enemy 'out there'. This 'cult of deviation'
is seen in Equus, in Wildfire, and in, for example,
Jonathan Moore's Treatment (Donmar Warehouse, London, 1986) which celebrates the
destructiveness of a football yobbo. What we
are given in Treatment is also the rationalization
of 'the survival of the fittest', and this is
partly where we find Thatcher's Britain in our
contemporary theatre.

present conservatism. The economic and the

political have created a malaise which the
theatre is demonstrating, but not analyzing. Yet
theatre could be a means of intervention, and the
argument about money cannot be the only
issue.
As Caryl Churchill said as far back as 1976:
'If our money is coming from people we are
opposed to politically, a point is going to come,
inevitably, when we are going to be in conflict
with them. So, one can't expect subsidy
indefinitely.'5 Given that there is no commitment or intention to maintain the Welfare
State or return to full employment, it seems
logical to assume that the government will not
continue to ' feed a theatre that bites it'. But the
worrying aspect of the present-day theatre is
that it lacks any real 'bite' anyway.
This seems to illustrate a lack of direction and
purpose at the point where theatre is most at
risk in the first place. Perhaps theatre is simply
mirroring what seems to be the lack of a
credible language of opposition in society as a
whole. As Michael Billington put it, in The
Guardian of 27 December 1986:
What I missed in 1986 were plays that addressed
themselves to the particular spirit of our times: most
especially, the privatizing greed and ingrained
racism that seem part of modern Britain
It is
almost as if the present is too vile or daunting to be
properly encompassed

The alternatives for theatre were clearly and

powerfully posed twelve years ago by Trevor
Griffiths in his crucial play Comedians (1975) Griffiths's Three Viewpoints
in which he specifically explores the function of
Another aspect is raised by Michael Billington comedy (or entertainment or art) in society.
The play presents three viewpoints which
in an article aptly titled 'Drifting Towards a
Sumptuous Escape', published in The Guardian critically divide what we call 'theatre' in terms
of intention and achievement. First, there is the
on 1 December 1986:
approach presented by Challenor: comedy/
We have a popular, commercial theatre edging back
entertainment/art as escape. Second, entertowards Victorian values and a reliance on romance,
tainment and art as a social necessity - 'comedy
spectacle, and sentimental
philosophizing....Econas medicine' - which is articulated by Waters.
omics lie at the heart of it. Whether one runs a
And third, the view of art/entertainment as a
commercial or a subsidized house, the prevailing
kind of hatred: 'You think the truth is beautiful?'
question seems to be not ' What would I like to do
asks Gethin Price, and continues: 'Truth was a
next?' but 'How can I get people in?'
fist you hit with'.
But Price's act in the club had, as Waters
Economics do lie at the heart of it, and there is
also what Billington called 'some intangible says: 'No compassion, no truth....Love, care,
spirit-of-the-times' as a source of theatre's concern, call it what you like, you junked it over
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the side.' In the play, Price's brilliant performance of hate shocks his teacher, Waters,
into the memory of his ENSA trip to a
concentration camp after the war:
Then I saw it. It was a world like any other. It was
the logic of our world...extended
And I
discovered... there were no jokes left. Every joke was
a little pellet, a...final solution. We're the only
animal that laughs
You know when you see the
chimpanzees on the PG Tips things snickering, do
you know what it is? Fear. They're signalling their
terror. We've gotta do some at about it....

And Waters then confesses that in addition to

revulsion in the concentration camp, he also had
an erotic response: 'Something...loved it, too.
We've gotta get deeper than hate.' Waters
recognizes the stimulation and even attraction
of' dark forces' and hence power.
Theatre as Escape
These three categories of entertainment are
even more distinctive now than they were
twelve years ago. The theatre as escape is
clearly present in one way in a play like Equus,
or the production of The Infernal Machine, in
that we as audience are enticed into colluding
with the sense that 'things are beyond us', but
there is also what has been aptly described as
'A Big Night Out and a vague moral glow at
the same time': the theatre of Les Miserables,
Cabaret, Cats, or La Cage aux Folks, and many

individual over the harsh anonymity of the

depression era, it actually celebrates the 'survival of the fittest'.
Equally, the revival of Cabaret took the point
out of Isherwood's original, the original stage
production, and even the film version of the
musical. The prime example, however, is that of
Les Miserables:
One thing is perfectly clear: audiences are hungry
for narrative, images, music and a feeling of moral
righteousness. In that sense the quintessential
Postmodern show...is Les Miserables....The real
argument against it is that it turns poverty and
injustice into a beautiful spectacle and that it
transforms metaphysical anguish into melodrama.
Victor Hugo's book makes you feel for the poor: the
musical makes them seem cute. The book explores
the Christ-like conflict in the heart of jean Valjean:
the musical reduces it to lyrical cliche. Les
Miserables is very far from being the worst musical
in London
But it is very symptomatic of our
times in that it gives you a Big Night Out and a
vague moral glow at the same time....6

Many of today's musicals have softened,

neutralized, trivialized, or destroyed anything
which could be seen as questioning values,
social behaviour, or the status quo. Under the
guise of'entertainment as escape', such musicals
in fact voice, reinforce or, at the very least,
assume the values prevalent in our society
today. And where there is a manipulation of the
audiences' feelings, those feelings are turned
towards sentiment and away from thought.

other big musicals.

Box-office returns make it clear that there is
a fervent desire on the part of the theatregoing
'Theatre as Medicine'
public to escape and forget the realities of the
day. In a depression, people feel depressed and Griffiths's second category of entertainment/art
want and need to be cheered up - entertainment as a social necessity - or 'comedy as medicine'
is, in any case, a crucial and valid function of - is also showing signs of the times, not the
theatre. But here, too, the theatre is demon- least of which is the effect of underfunding or,
strating our present society: Charlie Girl and in the case of many fringe companies, no
Me and My Girl illustrate today's hankering funding. If survival depends on profit, 'theatre
after the past and nostalgia for 'period'; Cats as medicine' is most at risk.
In retrospect, plays like Destiny (1977) or
has transformed the charm of T. S. Eliot's work
into a celebration of mechanization and glitz; Maydays (1983) by David Edgar seem essential
Forty-Second Street - the musical of the year - for the nation's health, but nonetheless belong
shows how young unknowns in the depression to an era in which basic humanist values were
could become stars through hard work and the not yet commonly dismissed or reviled as 'soft'
kind of values expounded by Norman Tebbit: or 'wet'. And in the inadequacy of his ending of
in the guise of celebrating the triumph of the Maydays, Edgar seems already to be exemp-

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lifying the problems and complexities in- 'feeling' and 'reason', or 'heart' and 'head'
volved in resolving the very crucial issues which need to be brought together; theatre history
Maydays attempts to dramatize.
has shown us that audiences can be moved by
Other major writers like Wesker and Arden, illumination, and not only by mystification.
whose plays in the 'fifties and 'sixties powerfully presented positive social and political
The Move to Mystical Anarchism
values about collective survival, now seem to
belong to an era which had discovered and 'Mystification' and Trevor Griffiths's third
spoken a different language. Seriously neglected category entertainment/art as a kind of
over the last 25 years, neither Wesker nor hatred seem to me exemplified in Howard
Arden seem to have touched the chord of our Barker's 'mystical anarchism'. Addressing his
time, in the way that each did in the past.
audience, Barker wrote: 'I alone come not to
Other than Trevor Griffiths, the one dramatist educate. I come to abuse you.' He writes in the
whose work seems to me to both analyze and language of the non-rational, and has stated
defend positive values from a first-base position that 'art brings chaos into order'. Praised for his
is Caryl Churchill - in Cloud Nine (1979), Top brilliant use of language, Barker in fact uses
Girls (1982), Fen (1983), and now Serious Money, language as verbal violence and abuse, and his
Churchill examines the pressures and realities of credo is that of 'engagement but confusion'.
our contemporary society with subtlety and
Barker's plays seem to be the other side of
complexity.
the coin of Thatcher's theatre: hatred of
In Serious Money she tackles today's mon- monetarist values leading to an anarchic reetarism head-on as 'a city comedy', utilizing sponse. As his publisher John Calder has said:
Thomas Shadwell's The Volunteers, or The 'Like George Orwell, he will always know
Stockjobbers (1692), and the use of the historical perhaps not exactly what he's for, but certainly
is juxtaposed with the contemporary to expose what he's against'. And as Barker himself has
values, behaviour, and social assumptions. said: 'The problem for Socialism is that it
Churchill never loses sight of the fact that the appears necessary for it to be, if effective, based
economic and political affect the personal and in authority, and where there is authority there
is a permanent degradation of the truth...'.
that the personal is political.
Yet the question arises as to whether Serious
The response to today's 'law and order' is
Money (or Pravda by Brenton and Hare, or Peter thus that there should be chaos and disorder.
Nichols's 1982 panto, Poppy7) do not flatter the But anarchy is not an opposition to reactionary
objects of their attack? Should a critique be populism. It was the very fear of anarchy, of
explicit? If not, the writer relies on the disorder, chaos and confusion, which motivated
assumptions of the audience - and what are many people in feeling the need for a strong,
those assumptions? How does the dramatist controlling external force.
address them? If the critique is explicit, then
At the beginning of his play That Good
there are the problems of avoiding the sen- between Us, Howard Barker quotes Matthew
tentious, the patronising, the didactic, and being Arnold: 'Wandering between two worlds, one
forced to give 'answers'. Is an implied critique dead/The other powerless to be born'. Theatre
sufficient to ensure that the objects of attack are which simply reinforces our own sense of
confronted?
impotence and confusion is not oppositional
theatre,
but is in this crucial respect Thatcher's
If theatre as ' good for the health' is not only
theatre.
to survive, but also to regain significance as
addressing our time, then three factors would
It is here that Equus or Wildfire join with
seem essential. First, it need not be a 'bitter pill' plays by Barker such as That Good between Us or
that audiences are forced to swallow - as David The Castle, albeit from apparently different
Edgar said some years ago, there has been too poles: mysticism; the irrational; violence,
little public accountability to audiences and whether physical or verbal; impotence, and
communities.8 Second, the need for 'treatment' an abdication and surrender to 'dark forces',
must be proved, not assumed. And third, whether undefined, or anarchic. The reaction to

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what Shaffer called 'prosaicism' in contemporary Britain and Barker recognizes as 'authoritarianism' is, effectively, to 'put out the
light'. We have moved a long way from the
assumption of Sarah Kahn at the end of Wesker's
Chicken Soup with Barley (1958): 'If t h e electrician who comes to mend my fuse blows it
instead, so I should stop having electricity?'
What Can the Theatre Do?

sources of entertainment, has the potential to be

life-enhancing - to appeal to the best in us but there is a major difficulty when the prevalent
ideological climate consists of an appeal to the
worst in us.
Brecht suggested a solution when he stated
that 'the present-day world can only be
described to present-day people if it is described
as capable of transformation'.10 But where
today's theatre does express today's society - as
in Howard Barker's plays, or Les Mise'rables, or
Equus - then it tends to express loss of direction,
confusion, fear, impotence, passivity, sentimentality, or cynicism - an endless string of
negatives.
If, on the other hand, the theatre tries to
present positives for 'tomorrow', then it is
often found Utopian, simplistic, 'out of touch',
given that audiences are, of course, irritated by
cliche, jargon, and preaching. But so long as the
theatre fails to fulfil its function of 'a good night
out' Gohn McGrath) and of simultaneously
providing illumination, intervention, and opposition, then it will remain not only unsatisfying
and seriously inadequate, but effectively in
collusion with today's ideological climate.

The purpose of this has been a highly selective

attempt at opening up a dialogue about the
crisis of theatre at the present time. The crisis is
not confined to Britain. In a German theatre
magazine, an article called 'Why Theatre at
All? - the Splendid Death of a Cultural Institution', by Wolfgang Max Faust, blames the
spectacular stagings of star directors for the
crisis, citing three examples of 'culpability':
Robert Wilson's 'theatre of pictures', seen as 'a
stage suffocating from its own aesthetics'; Peter
Stein's 'rescuing drama' as evidenced in his
production of The Hairy Ape (recently seen at
the National Theatre, London), in which 'an
uneasiness arises which recognizes the machinery of the stage as an end in itself, and
presents a hopeless picture of mechanized,
inarticulate and impotent man; and Peter
Zadek's 'historical piece' of Joshua Sobel's
Ghetto, in which 'the great success of the
staging became proof of a still-existing antiNotes and References
semitism: finally, the Holocaust found a
1. Christopher Ford, 'The Equus Stampede, The Guardian. 20
palatable form which makes the trauma of
April 1976.
9
history enjoyable '.
2. John Simon, New York Magazine, 11 November 1974,
But what can the theatre do in today's p. 118, quoted in File on Shaffer, compiled by Virginia Cooke and
Britain? What is its role or function in a society Malcolm Page (Methuen, 1987), p. 56.
J. Sanford Gifford, 'Psychoanalyst Says Nay to Equus', File on
in which the prevalent value is Snowy's 'looking Shaffer, p. 55.
out for number one?' Theatre is by its very
4. Bertolt Brecht, 'Speech to Danish Working-Class Actors on
nature a collective and public venture, and meets the Aft of Observation', in Brecht, Poems: Part Three, 1938-1956,
and Manheim (Methuen, 1976), III, p. 235.
particular problems when a society is indi- ed.5.Willett
Caryl Churchill, in Theatre Quarterly, Vol. VI, No. 24 (1976),
vidualized and 'privatized'. Theatre illustrates p. 40. Also see Trevor Griffiths's response in the same discussion.
6. Michael Billington, The Guardian, 1 December 1986.
and demonstrates contemporary social reality
7. See Colin Chambers and Mike Prior, Playwrights' Progress:
and only rarely changes it ('plays rarely turn
Patterns of Postwar British Drama (Amber Lane Press, 1987),
into incipient revolutions').
p. 82.
In exposing contemporary issues and realities,
the theatre can also explore alternatives. Yet
there are considerable problems for the theatre
if those alternatives are not clearly or cogently
formulated elsewhere: the theatre cannot do
what its society is not doing. Theatre, like other

8. David Edgar, in Theatre Quarterly, Vol. VIII, No. 32 (1979),

p. 28, quoting 'Grant Aid and Political Theatre', in Wedge,
Summer 1977.
9. Wolfgang Max Faust, in Wolkenkratzer, Art Journal, Frankfurt
(Main), No. 3 (1987); Wozu noch Theater?, p. 42.
10. Brecht, 'Can the Present-Day World be Reproduced by
Means of Theatre? (1955), in Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett
(New York, 1964), p. 274.

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