Stephen King’s Carrie and Peter Shaffer’s Equus both centre around teenage characters who are torn between their emergent sexuality and the religious views of their parents. King and Shaffer use characterisation to portray lust as a sin, then use...

The usage of animals to represent the innermost dilemmas and contradictions of the human-animal mind has been a commonplace practice since the tradition of storytelling. Despite the seemingly revolutionary implications that accompany the...

“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...

'"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...

Equus and Gattaca correspond in their development of similar ideas surrounding the societal and behavioral connections between power and control, although Shaffer and Niccol differ in their approach to these concepts through filmic and theatrical...

In Equus, by Peter Shaffer, authenticity is a main topic throughout the play and production in all setting, character and between dialogues. In existentialism; for one to live an authentic life, the individual has to choose the distinction between...

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 “...