Equus tickets from London Theatre Ticket Web.

Equus Several decades after its premiere maintains the power to electrify and challenge audiences. Shaffer was inspired towrite his play when he heard of a crime involving a teenage boy's apparently senseless injury to horses. Shaffer's masterpiece, a mystifying, indeed almost mystical central event to examine our capacity for passion, worship and pain. As the play opens, 17year old Alan Strang is brought to a mental health facility for treatment by Martin Dysart, a psychiatrist.  Alan's crime: blinding horses with a spike. The boy, who worked part- time in the stables where the attack occurred, would take a certain horse out for occasional night rides. Those jaunts functioned as the set piece for an elaborate ritual of exaltation constructed by his anguished psyche Delving into Alan's tormented mind causes Dysart to confront his own spiritual atrophy, the result of a modern consumer culture that tolerates only enervated conformity. Dysart reflects: "That boy has known a passion more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life. And let me tell you something: I envy it. I watch [my wife] night after night - a woman I haven't kissed in six years - and he stands in the dark for an hour sucking the sweat off his god's hairy cheek!" The horse stands for mysterious, uncontrolled inner impulse, for the life force itself.