There is something deeply unsettling about how society treats “normal” as though it were neutral.
BROCKMAN’s Equus is confronting, unbridled and utterly assured — a production that takes Peter Shaffer’s exploration of obsession, sexuality and worship and pushes it through questions of power, desirability and who gets to define what a healthy life should look like. J. James-Moody gives Dr Martin Dysart a devastating conflict: he knows Alan needs help, but fears that treatment may also strip away the very things that make Alan who he is.
Ryan Yeates is exceptional as Alan Strang, while Linda Nicholls-Gidley gives Hesther Salomon a sharp certainty that Alan simply needs to be fixed. Shalamah Tautaiolefue is extraordinary as Nugget, giving Equus an erotic, powerful presence while placing a fat queer body at the centre of desire without reducing it to novelty or fetish.
Most strikingly, someone is almost always watching from the edges of the stage. Alan, Nugget, the Nurse, the law — BROCKMAN turns observation into presence: judgement, desire, authority and social expectation pressing constantly against whoever occupies the centre. Even the contrast between Nugget and a conventionally muscular male body quietly exposes how easily some forms of beauty are accepted as “normal”.
The stripped-back staging and relentless sound design turn the theatre into a psychological pressure chamber. What emerges is a production asking a question far larger than whether Alan can be cured: who gets to decide what normal looks like in the first place?
“Confronting, unbridled and unburdened. Exactly what theatre should be.”