Peter Shaffer Essays

College

Equus

“The normal is the good smile in a child's eyes. It is also the dead stare in a million adults.”

– Peter Schaffer

As the deeply conflicted psychiatrist Dysart, Richard Griffiths delivers this line with wonderful restraint to an audience in the new...

12th Grade

Equus

'"Passion...can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created'" (Shaffer 109). Alan Strang is alone. He lives in a world of his own creation, born of mental illness and isolation, untouched and not understood by the rest of society. The only...

College

Equus

The play Equus was written in 1973 by Peter Schaffer. In the play, Alan, a 17-year-old boy with a horse fetish, blinds six horses in a stable, and it is down to Dysart, a psychologist, to understand why he did it. A major theme of the play is “...