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Steve de la Zilwa and Rohan Ponniah talk to Richard Simon about their forthcoming production of Peter Shaffer's Equus.
Inside the Equus command centre, housed in a vast Victorian mansion overlooking Kynsey Road, the atmosphere is relaxed and confident. Director Steve de la Zilwa tinkers with production notes at his computer keyboard, occasionally rising to pour himself some wine or hand round the Cambozola, a newfangled gourmet cheese he describes as ‘just like Camembert, only with a blue vein.’ Lead actor Rohan Ponniah, best known to Sri Lankans for his TV current-affairs programme, Benchmark, is doing what he loves doing best, talking. Pausing only to sip from the oft-replenished glass of vodka and tonic at his elbow, he flits with practised agility from topic to topic, equally at home with high philosophy and low gossip. He’s a nightmare to interview because he won’t keep to the point long enough to finish a sentence, but he’s a compelling listen all the same. De la Zilwa lets his leading man do most of the talking; the director’s contribution to the interview is barely more than a few words, delivered in a tone that brooks no argument.
You sense that firmness is necessary. Equus is powerful, potentially explosive material. Religious trauma and adolescent sexuality form the mainspring of the plot, commingling in the character of the stableboy Alan Strang to generate a potent psychopathology. Stricken with despair and frustration following a botched sexual initiation, Alan blinds six of his employer’s horses with a hoof-pick. It is up to Rohan Ponniah’s character, Martin Dysart, a psychiatrist troubled by priest-like ‘doubts’, to salvage him, to repair the trauma and turn him into a ‘productive member of society’.
Alan Strang is a typical product of the climate of the repression that persisted in the West until the 1960s. Though the same sort of repression yet survives in Sri Lanka, it seems to this writer that repressed adolescents are somewhat out of fashion these days. I put this to de la Zilwa and Ponniah.
A lot of people will say that repression ain’t what it used to be, that there are fewer Alan Strangs to be found nowadays. Is Equus still topical?
Rohan Ponniah Actually, I think we live in far more conservative times now. You could get away with a lot more in the Seventies. That’s one thing that has struck me hard about the play – I mean, good lord, that whole scene in the stable, the dialogue – I mean, it’s absolutely brutal, in-your-face...
And very embarrassing if not performed with conviction.
RP True. Very true. But Hiran (Abeysekera, who plays Alan Strang) is well up to it.
Alan is an extreme case, an exemplar if you like. Dysart keeps saying that, over and over again, ‘The extremity is the point. The extremity...’ It’s a touchstone, the ultimate reference-point, against which you measure the limits of passion and worship, see how far that can go.
But nowadays, young people quickly learn the mechanics of relationships and sex from sources Alan Strang never had access to. Kids with problems don’t suffer in isolation; they’re plugged into the internet, in touch with others just like them. They’re swapping fantasies and fetish images, forming a Web community, trying to convince the rest of us they’re normal...
RP Smriti Daniel’s article in the Sunday Times addresses this very point. The kids she talks to say a story like Equus is absolutely relevant to their generation because it’s all about being able to be yourself, and they feel today’s society – I’m talking about society here in Sri Lanka – gives them no space for that. They’re being questioned by authority all the time, unable to find autonomy.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you go and blind horses! But this is the licence we refer to when we speak of ‘artistic licence’. You can do these impossible things on stage, experiment with them for the good of society. Do a piece of theatre that has a horrific act like this as a reference-point, which deals with these terrible things.
But there again – as Shaffer points out – Equus is based on a true story. It really happened. Some people do feel so oppressed, so enclosed they have to strike out. Some people do blind horses.
Because they can’t bear to let themselves be forced into this straitjacket of normality?
RP As Dysart explains. He’s going to make Alan ‘normal’ – so that the boy can ‘trot off on his metal pony tamely through the concrete evening,’ as he puts it. But what is ‘normal’?
The times we live in are conservative and repressed. Thirty years ago, when we were in our late teens and early twenties, the spirit was – well, I don’t mean to sound arrogant, but we were certainly more ‘liberated’ – in terms of being intellectually and sexually adventurous, allowing our minds and bodies to go down different roads, to explore, often very thoroughly – and I’m not saying this didn’t have its dangers – but ‘normal’ had a far broader, more inclusive definition than the one in use today.
Do you think people still have as much faith in psychiatry as they did in the Seventies? The belief that a psychiatrist could actually ‘cure’ mental illness – even though Dysart in the play insists that it’s just a patch-up job – was still fairly widespread back then. I wonder whether people, educated people, actually believe in such cures any more.
RP Shaffer, in one of his interviews, said that when the play was first staged in England, what upset people most was the horse-blinding scene – a typically English reaction. But then, when they took the play to New York, no-one there cared about the horses. Instead, all these people were very, very angry that psychiatry had been impugned and psychiatrists taken to task! Because in New York, everyone had a shrink, and everyone believed totally in the good old ‘talking cure’. For New Yorkers, the religious elements didn’t matter – the blasphemy in Equus was against the holy office of psychiatry!
But I don’t think it’s quite the same now. Some of those questions, which the play raises, ultimately were played out.
Yet clinical psychotherapy is probably far more effective now than it was back then. Only they don’t use talking cures, they use drugs.
RP They’re aiming at the same result, which is to heal. But do they heal? Look at what the play is saying: the ‘cure’ – nowadays the drug – it takes away your worship, takes away your passion. It plays hell with your mind. Some people become zombies.
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Another dramatic aspect of Equus is the bowstring tension between Ponniah’s character, Dysart, and Alan Strang. The two are at least a generation apart, and at times Strang behaves as if Dysart is a substitute for his own somewhat cold and remote father, yet the two are more often at loggerheads.
There’s a strong element of male competition between the two, isn’t there? They’re at different ends of the potency curve; one an established psychiatrist, a man of some power, high on the social pecking order – but he is ageing, beginning to doubt his powers; he’s fading. Alan is the dead opposite; just out of childhood, educationally and socially underprivileged, already a loser – he’s never even kissed a girl when the curtain goes up – but he’s all adolescent vigour and virility, and the ecstasy he achieves in his communion with Equus is far superior to anything Dysart can rise to. Shaffer seems deliberately to be setting them up as opposites, the old bull and the young buck. And how does the bull respond? By castrating the buck. Dysart takes away Alan’s threatening potency.
RP And that’s Dysart’s dilemma. He doesn’t want to do that.
But something seems to compel him?
You know, Dysart and Alan go head to head in about four scenes. But from a clinical point of view, Dysart is playing his role as a doctor; he wants that recognition from Alan. To get him to talk. But he also uses a lot of cunning; he knows he’s doing something questionable.
In the second scene between Hesther (the magistrate who puts Alan into Dysart’s care) and Dysart, he actually admits it. He says in the play, ‘I’m jealous of Alan Strang. I envy him.’
How much do you believe in your character?
RP Very much.
Was that the case first time round? (Rohan Ponniah also played Dysart in the 1978 production of Equus, to considerable acclaim.)
RP Oh yes. It was – I was marvelling at this just today – everybody in the cast understood the play, even though we were so young and there is so much to understand.
Steve de la Zilwa That’s because we didn’t have all these strings attached. People nowadays imagine they’re supposed to think a certain way about things. We weren’t like that; we accepted things very easily, took them as they came.
You’re saying our generation was more sophisticated than today’s. A lot of Sri Lankans would be surprised to hear you say that.
RP Nowadays, people’s emotional and intellectual responses are far more conditioned by what they see on TV and the internet. These things give you a script; they tell you how to respond. Young people use terms and images they’ve seen on TV to express themselves. They watch... Neighbours or something, and they adopt the words and actions of characters on the show.
It was clear from the 1978 production that everyone, actors and director alike, understood the psychological minutiae of the play. Do you feel the same is true this time around? You two get it, obviously, but what about other members of the cast?
RP They’re getting it more and more.
SdelZ They would love to sit and talk about it. That’s for sure. We haven’t had too much of that.
RP The play can’t help but stimulate.
SdelZ It does that all the time, yes.
RP The words, the issues, do get through. But I still say that back then we were dealing with a far more – you can call it sophisticated, you can call it liberated, adventurous, free – cast and audience.
SdelZ People who had experienced far more of life.
RP Life is something you’ll experience anyway. But for us, then, it was experienced in a far more connected sense. It wasn’t arm’s length, coming at us through the media. There was more human contact, more connecting with the world around you. Because that was where you got your stimulation. That was your only reference point. Forget TV, barely anybody had a telephone! So real life was our main influence.
And now?
RP Still is, my dear, still is.
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