What's also interesting is to see how the play itself does and does not hold up. In its day, Shaffer's story of a disturbed stable boy who blinds six horses and of the child psychiatrist who treats him was genuinely shocking. It also meshed smoothly into the mood of the times, with its argument that psychiatry, though it may allow people to fit more easily into society, robs them of an essential wildness. Be passionately alive or live a normal life: Choose one.
In 2008, that doesn't feel like a fresh dilemma, nor does it seem central to the social conversation in the same way it did then. Nevertheless, director Thea Sharrock and her design team - including John Napier, who created the original metal horses' heads and wisely uses those unforgettable icons again - find majestic, spooky, and striking ways to embody the themes onstage. So, despite the occasional moments when Shaffer's talkiness makes the not-so-new ideas feel older still, the production builds a sustained emotional power.
In this Radcliffe's performance is central. Initially quiet, with an inchoate fury bubbling just below the surface, his Alan Strang is a troubling young enigma - to us, to the doctor treating him, and to everyone else who crosses his path (not least his parents, played with tightly coiled emotion by Carolyn McCormick and T. Ryder Smith). As his story unfolds, however, he opens up into a Dionysian figure of erotic desire and wordless terror, a truly primeval evocation of the horrifying passion of centaurs and their ancient gods. It's a strange, brave, and fascinating portrayal.
Richard Griffiths, as Dr. Martin Dysart, is more problematic. Forsaking the tightly buttoned suits of earlier actors in the part - because, he has said, he doesn't think a modern child psychiatrist would wear so "authoritarian" a costume - Griffiths becomes a rumpled and untidy presence, which seems at odds with Dysart's fears that he's just a buttoned-up bourgeois bore. He also delivers many of Dysart's loftier musings in so casual a tone that they lose some of their resonance; this helps avoid the pretentiousness to which Shaffer's writing can succumb, but it also saps some of its strength.
