Joanna Christie and Daniel Radcliffe in a promotional shot for Peter Shaffer's Equus. Photographer Uli Weber/AP
I spent my Saturday evening eagerly looking forward to the penis of a seventeen-year-old wizard. It wasn't just me there were just under a thousand other people looking forward to it too. Sure, we pretended to be there for other reasons; there was a play set around it with a taboo-breaking script, questioning concepts of faith and desire, as well as playing around with the Freudian impulses of teenagers. There were plenty of other theatrical big names from Richard Griffiths, to Jenny Agutter, the role of each as suited to them as if the thirty-year-old script had them precisely in mind. But that's not what we were there for. As much as we tried to deny it to ourselves, everyone was there for a bit of wizard knob.
Wizard knob, as I insisted on calling it to my disgusted friends, is what has sold-out a relatively obscure 1970s play about a boy in a psychiatric hospital, recollecting his desire to worship a quasi-Christian god he has named Equus, and how it led him to poking the eyes out of a stable full of horses. It's not exactly the Sound of Music. But the crowd did look the sort that were more used to Maria than, say, Marber. They were largely the inevitable teenage girls, around 16 or 17, some with mothers in tow. I wondered if it would be the first time they had seen a, well, in the flesh, as it were.
The girls arrived to a Gielgud Theatre with its frontage utterly transformed. A vast, black, board stuck out and over the whole building, on top of which was the slightly hairy chest of Harry Potter. Except he had a horse's head where his willy should be. It was a teaser: come one and come all to where no horse's head will block your view of the action!
Yes, the producer and marketing team knew exactly what they were doing. All promotional shots involve Daniel Radcliffe's torso in some way despite it only appearing twice on the stage itself. The tagline may as well say: "Wizard knob: exclusively at the Gielgud!" Actually, with the inevitable moaning of nebulous "concerned parents" perhaps they'd have been best using what Kenneth Tynan wrote in his diary about the first production that he commissioned for the NT: "In all the people who are shocked by his peculiar ways I see those who have despised my love of spanking."
As much fun as wizard knob spotting was, a problem arose in that the play was excellent. Thea Sharrock (by all accounts, a rather terrifying but brilliant young director) has created something set in a very real world, which explores some rather unreal things all with a set that consisted of little more than a few boxes. It was the most successful play I've seen so far this year, or at least it would have been if we weren't all there on tenterhooks waiting for the wizard knob. WK (as I should have started calling it far earlier in this piece) was an event. A silly celebrity event that interfered with a great story. I felt guilty; I should be above this. It's puerile. This is the bloody climax of the last two hours. It would be so much easier if the play had been bad. I could snort derisively (if I felt viscous) or whoop (which the teenage girls did inevitably at curtain call). Instead, all the mood setting, the quickening of pace, the serious but unpretentious tone of the production fell apart thanks to one simple thing: WK.
And to be fair, Radcliffe held back. I spoke to a friend who played the part in an off-Broadway production around 20 years ago. When I told him we saw the flaccid wand of Hogwarts he told me about an earlier scene where things were more "upright". Clearly not fancying method acting, Radcliffe did that scene with his jeans on.
When I got home my girlfriend's (a fringe director herself) dog decided to take a chunk out of my hand. I spent three hours in A&E at University College Hospital for a small cut that apparently required me to have a tetanus injection. Next to me sat a woman who said they were going to chop her leg off out of spite. It was because the doctor was in love with her and jealous of her husband, she told me through blackened teeth and bloodshot eyes. She then swore at several nurses and told her Irish husband that I had just said he was IRA. Luckily, he shook his head knowingly. When security finally came to throw her out she put forward the strong argument that they couldn't bar her from the premises: "I was born here!" She turned round, as though she had forgotten her bag, and proceeded to kick me, hard, on the shin. It was a suitably dramatic punishment from the gods. Maybe Equus himself.
I once met a girl who had been in As You Like It with Sienna Miller at the same time the star split from Jude Law. She told me it made the play unbearable, and completely focused around a single actor. Celebrity, as in proper celebrity with paparazzi and stalkers, doesn't work with theatre. Their spotlight is bigger than the rig above the intimate stage and their story, whether the discovery of an affair or a coming of age gesture, becomes bigger than the script. It may cause the place to sell out, and give the star some sort of credibility or what have you, but it can't half ruin a good play.
