What do you think of Daniel Radcliffe's performance? Have your say at the foot of this review

OK, it was exactly what all that prurient hype promised. For his theatrical debut last night, 17-year-old Daniel Radcliffe was brave enough to perform the denouement of Equus without wearing so much as the specs that are his Potter insignia. Like a zillion other actors since the censor’s exit 40 years ago, he stripped off, though this time for a sex-scene that proved as abortive as any puritan could wish.

But unless you’re a sad voyeur, as much in need of psychiatric help as that horse-lover and horse-mutilator, Radcliffe’s Alan Strang, you’ll be more interested in two questions. Is the boy wizard enough of a wizard boy to merit a place onstage beside Richard Griffiths? And how does Peter Shaffer’s play stand up 34 years after its premiere?

The first answer is that Radcliffe proves an assured actor and makes a perfectly able equimaniac. He can do aggression and pain, and, oddly, is lacking only in the sense of magic and wonder the part demands. The second is that, though gripping and theatrically skilful, Equus is at root dated, pretentious and even a bit pernicious, much like the 1960s guru who clearly influenced Shaffer. Is the “normality” that the late R.D. Laing hated really so inferior to the obsessive “passion” of a troubled boy sent to a mental hospital after blinding the six horses he worshipped?

The play is a detective story, but with a shrink as Poirot or Morse. Why did a harmless-seeming boy commit an atrocity that many English people would rate as barely better than serial murder? What did Alan finally see behind those big, glaring eyes? A magnificent but reproachful Pegasus accoutred with a bridle instead of wings; sexual challenge as embodied by the girl who tries unsuccessfully to seduce him; an authoritarian father; or the suffering Christ as worshipped by his ultra-devout mum? All, probably; but the clues clunkily dropped throughout the play suggest mainly the last two.

All this is sleuthed out by Griffiths’s Dr Dysart, who comes across as wry, dry, world-weary, melancholy: a self-professed pagan as bitterly aware of his own insufficiencies as Shaffer’s Salieri when confronted with Mozart in Amadeus. And here’s where the play gets suspect. Can you think of anything worse than “taking away someone’s worship?” asks the self-hating Dysart of Jenny Agutter as a kindly, concerned magistrate. But the answer is, yes you can, especially when a deeply troubled boy is on the couch.

Paedophiles worship children and robbers worship money, but that’s no reason to regard their “cure” as a sellout.

Still, Thea Sharrock’s production combines to good theatrical effect with John Napier’s simple design, an arc of black pillars and shadowy horse-stalls with plain cubes between them. The switches of past and present, narrative and event, are managed with effortless fluency. The supporting characters, though (that heavy socialist dad with a weakness for porn!) far from subtle, are decently enough played. The horses, actors with golden heads and hooves, look terrific. And Radcliffe has only one obvious weakness.

His Alan is pale, vulnerable, defensive, surprisingly tough; but he’s supposed also to find an exhilaration bordering on religious ecstasy in the company and, especially, the secret riding of horses. This, Radcliffe misses. Yet I can’t wholly regret his failure, because it makes an enjoyable play just a bit less morally meretricious.

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