EQUUS by Peter Shaffer

Author:Peter Shaffer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 1974-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

– 18 –

HESTHER: Now stop it.

DYSART: Do I embarrass you?

HESTHER: I suspect you’re about to.

[Pause.]

DYSART: My wife doesn’t understand me, Your Honour.

HESTHER: Do you understand her?

DYSART: No. Obviously I never did.

HESTHER: I’m sorry. I’ve never liked to ask but I’ve always imagined you weren’t exactly compatible.

[She moves to sit opposite.]

DYSART: We were. It actually worked for a bit. I mean for both of us. We worked for each other. She actually for me through a kind of briskness. A clear, red-headed, inaccessible briskness which kept me keyed up for months. Mind you, if you’re kinky for Northern Hygienic, as I am, you can’t find anything much more compelling than a Scottish Lady Dentist.

HESTHER: It’s you who are wicked, you know!

DYSART: Not at all. She got exactly the same from me. Antiseptic proficiency. I was like that in those days. We suited each other admirably. I see us in our wedding photo: Doctor and Doctor Mac Brisk. We were brisk in our wooing, brisk in our wedding, brisk in our disappointment. We turned from each other briskly into our separate surgeries; and now there’s damn all.

HESTHER: You have no children, have you?

DYSART: No, we didn’t go in for them. Instead, she sits beside our salmon-pink, glazed brick fireplace, and knits things for orphans in a home she helps with. And I sit opposite, turning the pages of art books on Ancient Greece. Occasionally, I still trail a faint scent of my enthusiasm across her path. I pass her a picture of the sacred acrobats of Crete leaping through the horns of running bulls—and she’ll say: ‘Och, Martin, what an absurred thing to be doing! The Highland Games, now there’s norrmal sport!’ Or she’ll observe, just after I’ve told her a story from the Iliad: ‘You know, when you come to think of it, Agamemnon and that lot were nothing but a bunch of ruffians from the Gorbals, only with fancy names!’ [He rises.] You get the picture. She’s turned into a Shrink. The familiar domestic monster. Margaret Dysart: the Shrink’s Shrink.

HESTHER: That’s cruel, Martin.

DYSART: Yes. Do you know what it’s like for two people to live in the same house as if they were in different parts of the world? Mentally, she’s always in some drizzly kirk of her own inheriting: and I’m in some Doric temple—clouds tearing through pillars—eagles bearing prophecies out of the sky. She finds all that repulsive. All my wife has ever taken from the Mediterranean—from that whole vast intuitive culture—are four bottles of Chianti to make into lamps, and two china condiment donkeys labelled Sally and Peppy.

[Pause.]

[More intimately.] I wish there was one person in my life I could show. One instinctive, absolutely unbrisk person I could take to Greece, and stand in front of certain shrines and sacred streams and say ‘Look! Life is only comprehensible through a thousand local Gods. And not just the old dead ones with names like Zeus—no, but living Geniuses of Place and Person! And not just Greece but modern

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