Riders of the Storm

For more than 30 years,British playwright Peter Shaffer’s Equus has challenged directors and fascinated audiences in equal measure. It is a complex,psychological drama requiring immense amounts of skill to portray it correctly,which explains why virtually no Indian theatre director has attempted it yet. No wonder there’s a lot of interest surrounding Kolkata group Ranan Performance Collective’s adaptation of Equus,to be staged at the ongoing Bharat Rang Mahotsav,the theatre festival of the National School of Drama.

Director Vikram Iyengar,31,has stayed true to Shaffer’s story about Alan Strang,a 17-year-old boy who blinds six horses with a metal spike in the stable where he works. Despite the public outcry for a severe sentence,Strang is sent to the overworked psychiatrist Dr Dysart. If the crime was terrible,the delusions in Strang’s thinking that Dysart unearths are even more so. “The subject was a potent comment on religion and passion and pertinent to our times,” says Iyengar. “For me,it was an added challenge because the play is full of powerful visuals but it wasn’t meant for a dance.” A well-known Kathak dancer,Iyengar and his troupe trained for eight months to create a suitable language for this play. The underlying sensation is a disturbing mix of the normal and the weird,created through the dancers’ actions,and music that ranges from punk to rave to classical. The human characters are clad in “dull,tweedy colours” and the horses (played by the dancers) are dressed in “a cross between Amazonian,punk and gothic”.

Iyengar’s Dr Dysart is a woman called Margaret (it was Martin Dysart in the original),which lends the text another layer. The psychiatrist,with a marriage devoid of passion,is on the extreme end of the spectrum from Strang’s own flaming heart. “I’ve tried to make the relationship more sensitive,” says Iyengar. Equus was in the news two years ago because Harry Potter movie star Daniel Radcliffe played Strang and appeared naked on stage. “I’m often asked how I tackled nudity on stage. I implied it in dance moves,and as every dancer knows,an implication is stronger than a literal image,” says Iyengar.

Equus will be staged at Abhimanch at 9.30pm on January 16.
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