Equus

Confidently staged, Peter Shaffer's Equus unfolds in the psychotherapy sessions of a disturbed young man and is a shocking exploration of the boundaries of faith, the intersecting worlds of the sacred and the profane, and the low value of an ordinary life, published in the Penguin Modern Classics series. When the confused boy Alan Strang blinds six horses with a metal spike, he is sentenced to psychiatric treatment. Dr. Dysart is tasked with uncovering what happened on the night Strang committed his crime, but in doing so, he also reopens his own wounds. Dysart secretly struggles to define sanity, justify his marriage, account for his career, and begins to question the normality of his lifestyle. Ultimately, he must ask himself: Is it the patient or the psychiatrist whose life is revealed? The most shocking play of its time, Equus uses an act of violence to explore faith.