Cody Acevedo
Equus, a play by Peter Shaffer was performed in London in 1973 and on Broadway in
1975 and was under controversy for its depictions of violence on horses and its flippant
psychiatry. Sanford Gifford said, "the play paints a picture of the psychoanalytic process that
demands a professional response… Shaffer presents us with a fictitious piece of psychopathy” (New York Times). The controversy of the seventies did not carry over to the new production; there is almost no mention of the psychoanalytical element in the revival and only a slight mention of violence on horses. When it was revived for a production at the Gielgud Theatre in 2007 by Thea Sharrock, psychoanalysis and violence were not under discussion; the only topic was the star of the Harry Potter film series Daniel Radcliffe. The Harry Potter films were box office smashes, gained a huge following not just in England but all around the globe. The fifth Harry Potter movie was slated for July 2007; building off the film series Daniel Radcliffe brought much attention to the revival of Equus. This time around, though, the only issue under scrutiny was Harry Potter's magic wand.
The magic wand referred to is, of course, Daniel Radcliffe’s penis, as you will come to
see in the reviews. People came to watch the 2007 production of Equus, not because it was the revival of a fantastic play, but to ogle at Radcliffe. Ryan M. Claycomb, in his work
"Middlebrowing the Avant-Garde: Equus on the West End," asserts, “Peter Shaffer’s play Equus was the most eagerly anticipated by the majority of my overwhelmingly female class. At the theatre, I saw that the demographic makeup of our class was entirely consistent with the rest of the audience" (99). Young women wanted to see Daniel Radcliffe in Equus, and that could make this production an overt sexualization of the young adult Radcliffe. This is not necessarily an event of Laura Mulvey’s male gaze, which is the study of the sexual objectification of women through media, but it is similar. It is not the female gaze, which is more thought of as an empowerment of women's sexuality than the objectification of men's bodies. As Zoe Dirse concludes in her work “Gender in Cinematography: Female gaze (Eye) behind the Camera,” “the challenge is to change the patriarchal way of looking by imposing the female gaze on our cultural life” (27). This production is neither of these, there is an apparent pleasure of looking at Daniel Radcliffe or a pleasure of wanting to look at him, which Sigmund Freud termed scopophilia. Shohini Chaudhuri breaks down scopophilia and states it "involves taking people as objects for sexual stimulation through sight" (34). The 2007 production was an event of an inversion of the male gaze, or instead is women asserting their sexual prowess over men and overtly drawing attention to the sexual body parts of the young adult actor. I will be using Mulvey’s thoughts and methods and applying them to this situation of a female audience objectifying a young male actor. I will show the event of an inverted male gaze on Daniel Radcliffe, who was playing Alan in the 2007 production. It is essential to look at this regarding both male and female sexuality, which will be done because of reviews from both genders and the accounts in Claycomb's work from his students. Moreover, I will look at Radcliffe in the passive feminine role and the female audience and Jill (Joanna Christie) in the active masculine role, which helps invert the male gaze.
Young women would not be considered those who attend the theatre, even though it was
on the West End, reserved for the mainstream or tourist attractions. Most of the fans of Harry
Potter who would not usually attend the theatre are attending to see Harry Potter all-natural: “For the crowd of 75 mostly female fans who waited outside the theatre’s stage door…most of them admitted that they had come to see Harry Potter naked” (Ben Hoyle). Hoyle uses interesting language here in this review where he asserts that they came to see Harry Potter but left with appreciation with the actor Daniel Radcliffe has become. The sentiment of long-time Harry Potter fans is captured well here, but the fact that so many people are coming to see a play to see a young adult naked is problematic. Sigmund Freud, in "Instincts and Vicissitudes," used the term scopophilia, “oneself looking at a sexual organ” (130). Shohini Chaudhuri, in her book Feminist Film Theorists, breaks down the concept, “active scopophilia, which uses another person as an object and in which the subject's identity is different from and distanced from the object on the screen" (35). Obviously, these young women have a different identity than Radcliffe, the young male actor. That is how they can objectify him as they do like Susannah Clapp when she stated in her review of the play, “It is Daniel Radcliffe, who has swapped his specs for pecs, dropped his shorts and transformed himself from genial boy wizard to sexually avid teenager” (The Guardian). Clapp is participating in scopophilia; she is looking at Radcliffe and nothing how he has changed from his role as a wizard and focuses on the sexual aspects of the new character. She notes to a specific body part of Radcliffe, being his pecs, and though she may be doing this as it rhymes with specs, there are underlying sexual tones in her words. They are not here to see the play but to partake in glancing at the naked body of a young actor. Equus does not take place on a screen, but the audience is distant from the actor by being part of the audience in the theatre. Distance is created by the fact that even though they are part of the play's
event, they cannot physically interact with it, which creates the distance needed to create the objectifying of Radcliffe.
This is not the only proof that Radcliffe is sexualized and objectified on stage. Women being in the active role and men being in the passive role is new and not something that has been considered entirely. The Independent released an article a week and a half before the premiere of Equus on the West End. Leading up to the premiere, Daniel Radcliffe was a large part of the play's marketing. According to Alice Jones, “the sensation comes in the gym-toned shape of the teenage Harry Potter star, Daniel Radcliffe, who has chosen the play for this theatrical debut, simultaneously shedding his clothes and his boy wizard tag” (‘Equus’ director reveals naked ambition). Instead of just referencing Daniel Radcliffe will be nude in the production, Jones sexualizes Daniel Radcliffe by stating his “gym-toned shape.” Mulvey states, “the position of the spectators in the cinema is blatantly one of repression of their exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire on to the performer” (836). Women, or the predominant force of the audience, desire Daniel Radcliffe; it is the only reason they are attending the theatre on the evening of their viewing, as seen by Clapp and Hoyle. Jones did an excellent job of engaging young women into the theatre with her words, adding to the sexualization of Radcliffe. This sexualization places women in the active role and Radcliffe in the passive role. Spectators for this production are primarily female, and they actively have to repress the fact that they want to sleep with Radcliffe. This repression of sexual drive places women in the active role; they find pleasure from watching Radcliffe in the penultimate scene where he is stripped of his clothes. A form of sexual stimulation is happening for women as they view Radcliffe mime intercourse with Joanna Christie. Therefore, this is not an example of the female gaze; These looks almost certainly objectify Radcliffe; he is there just for visual pleasure to them, which is a form of active scopophilia.
I am going to start using the term active female gaze, as I have shown that there is a
sexual objectivization of Radcliffe, and the term I am calling it is active female gaze. The visual pleasure undertaken by the audience of the play makes Radcliffe have what Mulvey notes is a "to-be-looked-at-ness.” All the reviews shown so far continue to discuss the naked body of Radcliffe as a dominant force and the main reason for attending the play. The active female gaze places Radcliffe into a position where he is the fantasy; he is on display for the audience in the dramatic scene at the end of Equus. Radcliffe playing Alan is on display for several minutes in the scene with Jill, "each remove their shoes, their socks, and their jeans" (101). The stage directions note that Alan and Jill both strip naked, and they do in this production. This is the scene that Potter fans have been waiting for, this large group that has been drawn to the theatre to witness Radcliffe in the nude. Radcliffe is displayed and it is visually erotic for the young women who make up the audience. According to Claycomb, Potter fans or "heterosexual female readers who largely make up the audience can envision sexual fantasies with their hero" (116). The audience wants to visualize themselves having intercourse with Daniel Radcliffe, who is nude on stage. There is no attention to the naked body of Joanna Christie, playing Jill, who is naked lying next to him; Radcliffe is the one displayed as a sexual object. Thus, creating the “tobe-looked-at-ness” that Mulvey says “signifies male desire” (837), but the only desire from the audience is female desire—again, creating this active female gaze, where Radcliffe is the one objectified.
Typically men are the driving force of the plot in the story, and Dysart is the
psychoanalyst who takes Alan back through all the trauma that led to his stabbing out the eyes of six horses. On the other hand, Jill is initiating the drive of the plot in the flashbacks and remembrances of Alan. Of course, the main scene that has all critics and Potter fans in a buzz is when Alan and Jill go back to the stables to have intercourse. In the scene, Jill is leading Alan through the motions:
JILL. Take off your sweater
ALAN. What?
JILL. I will, if you will. (101).
Jill is the one who is leading the movements through the play. We have not discussed her much, but Joanna Christie plays Jill and both strip in this scene. Usually, the women would be the central part of the spectacle of sexual desire through the male protagonist, which the audience gazes. Here Jill is acting as the surrogate for the women in the audience; she leads the "flow of action in moments erotic contemplation" (Mulvey 837). Though this is a breakdown of Shaffer's text itself, we can look to Claycomb's article, where he was very thorough in his analysis of the audience, "the theatre was rapt; the tension was palpable" (114). Claycomb describes the event where Radcliffe mounted Christie and started to thrust, miming vigorous intercourse. With this audience's description at the heated moment, we can understand the active female gaze. Women are aligning themselves with Christie, who is driving the action forward; even though this is Alan retelling the events, we can see that he views Jill as the one who is driving events. She is the force that brought them to the stable and started taking off their clothes. Alan says, "She did it! Not me. It was her idea, the whole thing!” (90). This also builds on the “to-be-look-at-ness” of Radcliffe, as women are watching Christie’s character and following suit. Jill leads the action, and Alan is in a more passive role. He is just going along for the ride. So, the audience will use Christie (Jill) as a surrogate for their fantasies.
Jill's character is not the main character of the play; that could be either Alan or Dysart.
Jill does have a prominent role in the later parts of the play, especially as a driving force for the mental breakdown that Alan goes through. According to Mulvey, film is structured around a main character that the audience tends to identify with (838). Since the audience is primarily female, they will not identify Alan. The male audience members will not identify with Alan because he is being psychoanalyzed for stabbing out the eyes of six horses. This leaves Dysart, which the minimal male audience may be inclined to identify with, but the majority of this audience is female, as we have seen with the Clapp, Hoyle, and the commentary from Claycomb. The female audience will most likely identify with the love interest of Radcliffe's character Alan, which is Jill. Jill is the main female protagonist; even though she may not be the main character of the play itself, she is the main one that the female audience identifies with and then sexualizes Radcliffe because Jill sexualizes Alan. On page 90 of the text, Jill says, "How would you like to take me out" (90)? Jill is acting as the instigator of the action. Alan is not the one asking Jill on a date. When this is acted out on stage, Christie will lead the action with Radcliffe next to her, which eventually leads to the nude scene. Jill being the one to escalate the play's tension, as Alan remembers, the stare of Christie (Jill) onto Radcliffe (Alan) is followed by the audience. Young women in the audience find Christie to be a suitable surrogate, and she is acting as the active female character for the active female gaze to follow. With Jill as the surrogate for the female audience, this further proves that this production was an event of what I am terming the active female gaze. Radcliffe as Alan was displayed for the theatre audience, and Christie as Jill, sexualizing and objectifying him.
The gaze done by the female audience can be seen from multiple angles, but they are all
gazing at one thing, and that is Daniel Radcliffe. Claycomb continues his analysis of the
audience by saying, “two of my female students had brought opera glasses to the production and passed them back and forth hushedly” (114). We can only assume that these female students were at the theatre that night because it was part of Claycomb's class. This does offer evidence to them being there to get a closer view of the body of Radcliffe. Claycomb noticed these two passing back the opera glasses only during the sex scene when Radcliffe was stark naked. Claycomb also noticed a father "shifted uncomfortably in his seat" who was there with his daughter. This comfortability created in the father and Claycomb himself as he sees his students attempting to get a better look at Radcliffe creates an atmosphere of the active female gaze. Women are controlling the space of the theatre and the entire event of the 2007 production of Equus. Therefore, Radcliffe is acting as a sexual object for the audience and Jill, one of the characters in the play. Radcliffe is sexualized on these two levels of the "characters in the screen story" and "an object for the spectator in the auditorium" (838). Mulvey uses these two levels to understand the woman displayed, but it can be used to look at how Radcliffe is displayed. I have shown Radcliffe is sexualized by the character Jill and by the members of the audience, which places Radcliffe in an objectified state.
The heterosexual men in the crowd find something to make themselves not panic that
they are participating in displaying Radcliffe's naked body. There is a sense that they participate but do not want to participate. Claycomb describes, "the sole young man in my class announced immediately after the show that he was now sure of his sexuality, and that he had found looking at the actress playing Jill to be quite satisfying" (114). Now, this can be taken a few ways, but I agree with how Claycomb thinks of it, and that is as "heterosexual panic." This male student was a participant in the act of viewing Radcliffe sexually, and thus he has to straighten out the story that he enjoyed viewing Christie. The individual spectators become one whole audience when viewing the production. Chaudhuri breaks down the concepts of the male gaze and says, “narrative cinema imposes ‘masculine’ viewing strategies on all of its spectators, irrespective of their actual sex” (44). Women can possess the "masculine" viewing and take control, which is what is happening here. All of the spectators in the audience are feeling the active female gaze, which makes the heterosexual men uncomfortable, so the young male student has to exclaim his heteronormativity further. For this production of Equus, women are in control of the fantasy of the play and take men on the ride with them, which causes this heterosexual panic that Claycomb describes. Though these men would generally be "reluctant to gaze at his [Daniel Radcliffe's] exhibitionist like" (Mulvey 838), they do so because of the active female gaze created by this event. All of this works to put men in the passive role and women in the active role.
According to Mulvey, "the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification,"
but I have shown that Radcliffe is part of sexual objectification (838). Women are dominant in
this auditorium; they control where the other audience members focus their attention. Daniel
Radcliffe is growing on them literally and metaphorically. Hoyle, in his review, says, "the
number of cameras confiscated on the way into the theatre each night… remains much more about Radcliffe than about the theatre" (London Times). Something is happening concerning Radcliffe and his fandom that is causing a unique occurrence for the male gaze to be inverted, which I have been calling the active female gaze. An American student Erin Williams (qtd. in Hoyle), said, “It was a complete role reversal… he looked really good, but he was very mature on stage" (London Times). During this production, Harry Potter fans controlled how Radcliffe was visualized in the theatre, and it created this active female gaze. They were in control of the fantasy produced by Radcliffe being nude; they got to objectify his body for their own sexual pleasure. This is what Freud calls exhibitionism, “an object which is oneself or part of oneself being looked at by an extraneous person” (130). Radcliffe is on display for the audience to look at him. Part of acting is being on stage in front of people, and women like Williams and the students of Claycomb's class are spectators looking at the magic wand of Daniel Radcliffe. So, this exhibitionism Radcliffe is under is part of the active scopophilic relationship discussed earlier. Mulvey also relates the exhibitionist with the more passive female. However, since Radcliffe is in the role of the exhibitionist, he must be in the passive role, making him the objectified object of the scopophilic audience.
Further placing Radcliffe in the passive role and as an exhibitionist is the scene when he
is miming intercourse with Christie (Jill). In this scene, Alan is impotent and cannot finish the
job, which I will use as a form of castration, which can be described as losing or damaging the male genital region. Impotence in this form is a man not able to finish intercourse or not even get in the mood. Typically men go through castration anxiety when viewing a female and “by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous” (840). Part of the Male Gaze is men looking at women and seeing they do not have a penis/balls and get castration anxiety which is unpleasurable. Instead of breaking the look, men rationalize and think of women as sexual objects. Men have to turn a woman into a sexual object to avoid the concept of castration, but what happens when a form of castration is performed in front of them:
DYSART. What was it? You couldn’t? Though you wanted to very much?
ALAN. I couldn’t… see her (103).
This implies that Alan was impotent at trying to have intercourse with Jill, which would have
been part of the production on stage. Alan wanted to feel the horse Nugget and not the naked body of Jill. A line from Jill continues this impotence, "There's nothing wrong; believe me! It's very common" (104). All of this implies that Alan could not perform in some capacity when it comes to sex. Suppose men are afraid of the possible idea of castration which is what Mulvey implies in her understanding. In that case, men watching a form of castration (impotence) on stage must be horrifying for their unconscious minds. One of the dominant ways to escape castration anxiety is to turn the object into a fetish and sexual object. I have already shown that women objectify Radcliffe, but this brings everything together. Now, the men in the audience are forced to sexualize Radcliffe as well. Men fear the weakness and loss of their genitals; thus, the impotence they watch on stage is a form of castration they have to watch. This places all the men in the audience in the passive role under the women, allowing Radcliffe to become an object. Men have lost all agency; the auditorium is mostly female. Men have just watched a form of castration play out in front of them. They are laden with anxiety, placing them in the passive role and giving women the active role in the theatre.
Daniel Radcliffe is objectified in this production of Equus. This was an event of the
active female gaze, and this is why this production of Equus was so controversial. I am not
saying that the patriarchy has crumbled down, and women objectify men in everything. I believe this may be a one-time situation, but it proves that a female audience can objectify a male actor. However, one angle not fully considered in this work is that of Kaja Silverman. Silverman’s work Male Subjectivity at the Margins focuses on a type of gaze she calls “the look" and other concepts around the idea of a non-oppressive gaze. I did not use it in this work because I felt that the gaze in the event of the 2007 production of Equus was an oppressive gaze and should be analyzed in that form. Not saying it isn't wrong that women objectify men, but there is a new togetherness that is created by these two groups being able to objectify each other. I do think this situation with Equus and Radcliffe is a rare occurrence and may have been created by Radcliffe's stardom rather than his male body, but still, this was an event of what I am calling the active female gaze. A gaze displayed Radcliffe for the entire auditorium of young women, all for visual sexual pleasure for many months.
Though this piece contains many reviews of the play Equus, there are countless many as
social media was starting, many people were experimenting with writing their ideas down. Many people started blogs and other things, so there is a lot more to explore with this play's production. One of those ideas is a ghosting effect between Harry Potter and Daniel Radcliffe. These names are used interchangeably throughout the reviews and interviews. This instance of an inversed male gaze could only happen because they were looking at a fictional character and not Daniel Radcliffe, but that is not how I read the controversial event. I saw a sexualization of a seventeen-year-old actor, and this was predominately down by a female audience. Thus, I used those who have theorized the gaze and objectification to explore Radcliffe in the 2007 version of Equus. It would be interesting to find more situations of the active female gaze to see if it is something of a one-time occurrence or if it will be something that occurs more as time passes and the culture of the world changes.
Works Referenced
Chaudhuri, Shohini. Feminist Film Theorists: Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de
Lauretis, Barbara Creed. Taylor and Francis, 2006. Print.
Clapp, Susannah. “Enough of this horse play.” Review of Equus by Peter Shaffer. The Guardian, 4 March 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2007/mar/04/theatre. Accessed 3 December 2021.
Claycomb, Ryan M. “Middlebrowing the Avant-Garde: Equus on the West End.” Modern drama 52.1 (2009): 99–123. Web.
Dirse, Zoe. “Gender in Cinematography: Female Gaze (Eye) Behind the Camera.” Journal of
Research in Gender Studies 3.1 (2013): 15–29. Print.
Freud, Sigmund et al. “Instincts and their Vicissitudes.” The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by Stachey, James et al., London:
Hogarth Press, (1957): 117-140. Print.
Hoyle, Ben. "Chance to see Harry Potter in the Flesh Forces Stars to Flee Through the
Window." Times, 27 Feb. 2007, p. 9. The Times Digital Archive,
link.gale.com/apps/doc/IF0503513740/TTDA?u=csuf_main&sid=bookmark-
TTDA&xid=5a46b20e. Accessed 3 Dec. 2021.
Jones, Alice. “Thea Sharrock: ‘Equus’ director reveals naked ambition.” Review of Equus by
Peter Shaffer. Independent, 15 February 2007, https://www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/theatre-dance/features/thea-sharrock-equus-director-reveals-nakedambition-6228835.html. Accessed 3 December 2021.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism:
Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP,
1999: 833-44.
Shaffer, Peter. Equus. Scribner, 2005.
Biography
Cody Acevedo is a graduate student at CSU Fullerton. He has a vast array of interests for study but has found most of his time dedicated to exploring the modern period of drama.
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