Sex and Sexuality Theme Analysis

Alan Strang’s religion and the rituals he develops around it are highly erotic. His description of riding Nugget in the field highlights the physicality and sensuality of the event, and his desire to be “One Person” with Equus suggests how religion and sex can be transcendent, spiritual activities. As Dora Strang says, sex can be “the most important happening of [one’s] life.” But Alan’s worship of Equus also indicates Alan’s wish to be like a horse—that is, to express his animal instincts. The ritual of becoming “One Person” with Equus is simultaneously an act of purification and a surrender to bestial desire. In this way, Alan’s religious ritual is also a kind of sex act, in its combination of perfect love and animal lust.

It is perhaps because Alan’s sexuality is repressed throughout the play that his erotic and religious activity is intertwined, also, with acts of self-harm. While Equus grants Alan a sense of sexual and spiritual freedom, the shame that Alan feels regarding his sexuality forces him to submit himself to immense physical pain. The intensity of Alan’s shame is revealed at the end of the play when, after his embarrassing sexual experience with Jill Mason, he blinds the horses in the stable, then begs for his own death. Alan’s attempt to have sex with Jill may be read as an attempt to “normalize” his sexuality—that is, to make his sexuality conform to society’s expectations. In his failure to become aroused by Jill, he feels at once embarrassed that he is unable to perform what a man “should” be able to perform, and ashamed that he has betrayed his true passion, the horse-god Equus. The shame becomes too much to bear: hearing Equus’s accusatory and judgmental voice in his head, Alan blinds the horses in the stable, wanting to silence the force that has ruled his life and made him a societal outcast.

Alan’s sexuality is not the only sexuality that is being repressed in Shaffer’s play, however. Toward the end of Act Two, when Jill and Alan attend a pornographic movie, the play makes it apparent that society as a whole has repressed the sexual desires of human beings. It is only in the dark that humans are allowed to express their carnal desires. Alan finally realizes that sex is a natural thing for all men when he runs into his father, Frank, in the pornography theater. In that moment he understands that all men have their own secrets, and enact their own fantasies in private. Alan’s own passion, however, is too intense to be kept in the darkness of a pornography theater. The collision between his “normal” sexual encounter with Jill and the site of his erotic and spiritual rituals proves too much for Alan, and results in his heinous crime and psychological breakdown.

Alan Strang powerfully embodies the conflict between modern society and human nature. In the beginning of the play, he communicates only by singing advertising jingles; this expression of commercial culture in Alan’s psychopathic state stresses the repetitive and dehumanizing nature of modern life. His hatred of modern society emerges in his religion as well: the brands that Alan sells at the appliance store—Hoover, Remington, etc.—become the “foes” that he rides against during his midnight adventure with his horse, Nugget. Alan’s desire to live outside the bounds of modern society also manifests itself in his admiration for cowboys. In his mind, cowboys are lawless orphans, nomadic individuals who are completely free and uninhibited, untethered from the repression of family and society.