Screenplay: Equus (screenplay)

Overview
Peter Shaffer's 1977 screenplay adapts his intense stage drama about a young man who blinds six horses and the psychiatrist who tries to understand why. The story is told largely through the investigating psychiatrist's perspective, moving between clinical interviews and vivid flashbacks that reconstruct the patient's inner life. Shaffer keeps the original play's concentrated psychological pressure while using the possibilities of film to expand setting and physical detail.

Plot
A disturbed adolescent named Alan Strang is brought to psychiatric attention after a brutal attack on horses at a stable. Dr. Martin Dysart, a seasoned family psychiatrist, takes on the case and gradually pieces together Alan's history through sessions that double as reenactments. The narrative alternates between Dysart's methodical questioning and immersive sequences that show Alan's secret life: a home marked by conflicting parental influences, a fascination with horses, a complex sexual awakening, and the construction of a private, quasi-religious cult centered on a deity he calls "Equus." As Dysart uncovers ritualistic devotion, eroticized worship, and the boy's mounting rage, the clinical goal of diagnosis collides with a deeper ethical dilemma about what it means to "cure" passionate, if pathological, belief.

Characters
Dr. Martin Dysart serves both as investigator and moral center, articulate and reflective but increasingly unsettled by what he discovers. Alan Strang is a volatile mix of adolescent vulnerability, religious fervor, and misunderstood desire; his inner mythology gives his acts meaning even as they repel the community. Alan's parents represent opposing forces of influence, strict, moralistic attitudes on one hand and a more pragmatic, muted domesticity on the other, while a young woman associated with the stables becomes the catalyst for Alan's sexual experimentation and confusion. These figures orbit Alan's need for meaning and Dysart's struggle to reconcile clinical objectivity with human empathy.

Themes and Style
Shaffer's screenplay probes the tensions between passion and normalcy, ritual and reason, and the cost of social conformity. Equus interrogates whether psychiatric "cures" merely replace one form of truth with another, asking whether a life of dull but acceptable functionality is preferable to one lived by intense, transgressive belief. The film balances courtroom-like exposition with fevered, dreamlike tableaux that visualize Alan's worship: horses as both eroticized bodies and sacramental icons. Cinematically, the screenplay translates theatrical intensity into visual immediacy, using close-ups, spatial detail, and the physical presence of real horses to heighten the drama while retaining the play's concentrated psychological focus.

Conclusion
By preserving the moral ambiguity and raw emotional stakes of the original play, Shaffer's adaptation refuses easy answers. The resolution forces psychiatrist and audience alike to confront the costs of healing, the loss entailed in bringing a troubled soul back into ordinary life, and the fragile line between devotion and madness. The screenplay leaves a lasting question: whether rescuing someone from darkness can also strip them of the very thing that made life meaningful.