Equus Review: Thirteen Reviews and a Very Loaded Name

Equus is Latin for horse. It is also a famous play about a boy who blinds six of them. The bar has not clarified.

Equus is Latin for horse.

Equus is also the title of Peter Shaffer’s 1973 play, in which a stable boy – in a state of religious and sexual crisis – takes a metal spike and blinds six horses. It premiered at the National, it has been revived repeatedly in the West End, and it is one of the most disturbing pieces of British theatre of the last century.

There is now a bar called Equus. It has thirteen reviews and a 4.5. It is in Theatreland. It has not, as far as we can establish, addressed this.

The two readings

The generous one is that the name is simply Latin, chosen for the sound – clean, classical, two syllables, available as a domain, which as we established at Setlist is the actual selection criterion in this district.

The other reading is that somebody in the West End, surrounded by theatres, named a bar after a play about the blinding of horses and either did not know or did not care.

The Prat’s cultural desk has assessed both possibilities and reports that it cannot rule out the first, would prefer the second, and suspects the truth is the most depressing available option, which is that nobody in the room has ever heard of the play.

Thirteen

Thirteen reviews. We are back in the territory we have been complaining about for ninety-three articles: a rating built on a sample so small that it tells you essentially nothing.

A 4.5 from thirteen people means roughly seven fives, five fours and someone who had a bad night. It could be a superb bar. It could be an unremarkable one. We cannot tell you, and neither can the number, and the listing site is going to display it next to the Harp regardless.

What the play is actually about

Worth stating properly, since we have come this far.

It is about a psychiatrist who cures a boy of a violent, private, ecstatic religion – and who realises, in doing so, that he is removing the only thing in the boy’s life that was genuinely alive, and replacing it with a competent normality that he himself finds unbearable.

It is a play about whether it is worth being made ordinary. And it is set, largely, in a consulting room where a professional man drinks and asks himself what he has done with his own life.

Which is, we would gently observe, a rather more appropriate theme for a Covent Garden cocktail bar than anybody involved appears to have intended.

Horses, and this postcode

It is worth noting how many of them there are here. The Horse and Guardsman, named for a man on one. The Bear and Staff, on a street named for an animal chained to a post. The White Swan, a heraldic bird. Equus.

Central London’s pub signs are a menagerie, and almost all of it is either heraldry or entertainment – which in this city, for several centuries, meant the same thing: animals owned by powerful people, displayed to prove it, or animals set on each other for money.

Very few of the animals on the signs of Covent Garden were having a good time.

Verdict

Small, well-made, unknowable on the numbers, and named – accidentally or otherwise – after one of the darkest plays in the English repertoire.

Go, order something, and be the fourteenth. Somebody has to be.

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]