A Destabilized 'Equus'

NEW YORK -- He's such a forthright, stouthearted lad, our Daniel Radcliffe. These attributes always serve him well, whether he's being subjected to late-night TV ribbing by Conan O'Brien or playing that magical movie character -- you know, whatshisname, the one with the round specs and the scar on his forehead? (Wait: It'll come to me.)

So now he has gone and repurposed all that pluck for a role on Broadway that has him engaged in dark art rather than the dark arts: that of Alan Strang, the wildly disturbed teenager who blinds six horses in Peter Shaffer's '70s psychiatric drama, "Equus."

This is Radcliffe's first serious stage portrayal, and though his contribution won't blow you away, it does get a basic job done. Small-framed and fit-looking, with a rivulet of scruffy beard fringing his jawline, the 19-year-old Radcliffe portrays Alan as a lost man-child drifting needily into the orbit of a shrink, who recognizes in his new patient the rapture missing from his own sterile existence.

The doctor is played, fortunately, by the gifted Richard Griffiths, who it just so happens is a nasty Muggle in all those, uh, Barry Trotter movies. (He also won a Tony as the unorthodox teacher in Alan Bennett's "The History Boys.") Thus in this erratic revival of "Equus," which opened Thursday night at the Broadhurst Theatre, there is a core of leading-player technical proficiency. Even though the play itself comes across now as a solemn, stately affair, involving a therapeutic "mystery" so stuffed with transparent clues that a freshman psychology major could crack it.

"Equus" was a major force the first time it was on Broadway, where it ran for more than 1,200 performances and attracted a succession of magnetic actors (Anthony Hopkins, Richard Burton and Anthony Perkins, among them) to the role of Martin Dysart, the passion-starved child psychiatrist. With the casting of Radcliffe -- whose bare torso is, with reason, the production's poster art -- the show's balance of star power shifts to the younger character. It's not at all clear that this is good for the story, for "Equus" is perhaps more about an older man's yearning for some kind of spiritual renewal than it is about the roots of a boy's pathological behavior.

Director Thea Sharrock, who first staged this production with Radcliffe and Griffiths in London, goes in mostly for a nostalgic embrace of the original's highly theatrical staging, though she seems to crank up the fog and smoke. As when it made its debut here in 1974, "Equus" is presented as if it were a riff on classical drama. The set -- John Napier returns as designer of costumes and scenery -- is a minimally adorned arena, ringed with the stalls of the ill-fated horses, played by six lean, well-muscled actors.

The horse's heads, as of yore, are sculptural and mounted on the actors' shoulders. As with the original, too, some spectators are seated on or, in this case, above the stage. Just asking: If one were concerned about a dated dimension to the piece -- which the playwright himself makes mention of in his program notes -- why wouldn't there have been more of an effort to give this new incarnation an original look?

Some of the acting is impressive, particularly by Anna Camp as a vibrant young woman whose courting of Alan sets in motion his psychosexual crime. A few other performances are seriously misdirected, such as that of Kate Mulgrew, who plays the secondary role of a local magistrate so operatically that she threatens to transform the evening into "Aida." As Alan's parents, Carolyn McCormick and T. Ryder Smith turn in rather gray portrayals.

Radcliffe fares best when conveying Alan's boyish confusion. He isn't an especially menacing presence, so there is not much sense of Alan's explosive side, of the damaged, untamed nature that psychiatry must "cure." (One of the play's more antique notions is how it romanticizes Alan's violent streak, as if there were something beautiful and artistic about his illness.)

As a result, the scenes between Alan and the doctor, while intelligently acted -- Griffiths gets right the tuning-in skills of a professional listener -- don't ever become galvanizing tests of will; for a play seeking to tell us something about passion, the proceedings remain remarkably unimpassioned.

Much has been made in the press of the fact that Radcliffe has to perform a pivotal reenactment scene in his birthday suit. The audience I watched it with was unfazed but, oddly enough, giggled in another scene -- when Radcliffe had to pull out a cigarette and light up. You could almost hear his fans thinking: Didn't they teach about the hazards of smoking at Hogwarts?

Equus, by Peter Shaffer. Directed by Thea Sharrock. Lighting, David Hersey; sound, Gregory Clarke; movement, Fin Walker. With Sandra Shipley, Lorenzo Pisoni, Graeme Malcolm, Collin Baja, Tyrone A. Jackson, Spencer Liff, Adesola Osakalumi, Marc Spaulding. About 2 1/2 hours. At Broadhurst Theatre, 235 W. 44th St. Call 212-239-6200 or visit http://www.telecharge.com.