Star rating***

Peter Shaffer's remarkable 1973 play about a boy who blinds horses is an unlikely candidate for revival. Beyond starry casting, however, this utterly serious study of faith, desire and loss of both now looks set for Broadway. Selling out the Theatre Royal on a cold Tuesday night further suggests a very clever sleight of hand by director Thea Sharrock has paid dividends.

It is, however, a play recognisably of its time. The clash between stable boy Alan Strang and his psychiatrist, Dysart, looks initially like one more bourgeois dissection of pan-generational dysfunction that trickled into the mainstream in the 1960s post-counter-cultural fallout.

Indeed, Alan's eroticisation of the horses he adores and his subsequent destructive betrayal only serves to highlight Dysart's hollow inability to feel. The two become mirror images of a fragmented society with little to believe in. Where for Alan sex is something so sacred it kills the thing he loves, for Dysart, such heart and soul doesn't even exist.

It takes a while for Simon Callow's Dysart and Alfie Allen's Alan to move beyond such a Laingian case study. This is largely down to a mannered style of acting in which Dysart's inner demons are never fully channelled to Callow's far too chummy and boisterous turn. Allen, too, would benefit from learning the tunes of the 1970s jingles his character makes his mantras.

When the play becomes truly transcendent, however, it's stunning stuff. Alan's moment of ecstasy at the end of act one, and the pivotal later scene leading up to the desecration of all he holds dear, are pure theatricality that stems from a mixture of Sharrock and Shaffer. It also demonstrates why such a cry for help still matters today.