Middlebrowing the Avant-Garde: Equus on the West End

As text, performance, and pop-culture signifier, we can trace Peter Shaffer's play Equus - from its avant-garde influences through its middle-class anxieties to the middlebrow spectacle of the recent high-profile production in London - as a local example of a familiar (but not inevitable) narrative of the dilution and recuperation of avant-garde aesthetics by a late-capitalist economic system of transnational media integration and commodification. The play itself, from its original production onward, pathologizes and contains the avant-garde as both mad and queer, recuperating it into a framework of liberal, middle-class ethics and economics, an effort that is redoubled by this most recent production in text, in performance, and in the material context of the performance. But even as this play, in performance, seems to help mark out the trajectory of the death of the avant-garde, it also troubles the waters of this death-narrative with traces of the residuum of a resistant, even queered, avant-garde that fingers beyond narrative containment and cultural co-opting.