23 December 2020
Sometime in my mid-high school years (c. 1976), a rumour circulated that Richard Burton was filming in Oakville. Richard Burton was a mid-20th-century legend, as famous for his romances and off-stage life as for his prodigious skills as a thespian. If you have any doubt of the latter claim, watch his Hamlet, dressed in contemporary black slacks and turtleneck.
Oakville really was a town then. It didn’t take long for word to emerge that the filming was at a Lakeshore Road estate, Avalon, owned by the family of two brothers at our Oakville Trafalgar High School. At that estate, Richard Burton filmed scenes from Equus. He played a psychiatrist treating a male teen. That young man had blinded horses he adored, seemingly because they had witnessed his inability to consummate a romantic liaison above the stables.
Dr. Dysart sees that teen differently than anyone around him. He sees the young man’s illicit and naked midnight rides on his revered horses, equus, as a peak psycho-religious experience reaching back into rituals thousands of years gone. He sees the boy as vibrantly alive, in a way that he, Dysart, hasn’t been for decades. This was my first encounter with therapeutic thought as metaphor, two concepts I don’t believe I had never combined. I had no idea of the causal chain that would slowly unwind upon witnessing Burton’s rendition of Dr. Martin Dysart. That film opened a file in my mind that still welcomes submissions.
And maybe I should have been primed, for the 1970s had no shortage of great films being screened at our local Odeon Theatre, on Lakeshore Road. Both The Godfather (1972) and The Great Gatsby (1974), were stories that changed the way people saw themselves, places, and history. Equus was released to little fanfare, and I didn’t see it. Nor did I forget it.
Sometime around 1988, probably on a Friday night after a pub dinner, my dear wife and I were cruising video stores in downtown Oakville, renting VCR tapes. I spotted Equus and reached for it, to see what it was about. I remember sensing that this was a film and story I would be thinking about for some time. That was an understatement.
The word equus is Mycenean-Latin for “horse.” The name of the estate, Avalon, probably derives from Insula Avallonis, Latin for “…the isle of fruit trees.” Before the paving of Lakeshore Road in 1908, the southern sections of Oakville and Burlington were the fruit basket of Canada, characterized by lakebed soil and great sunlight. The driving force (the horsepower) within me is a quest to understand people and life. Burton’s Dr. Dysart, in an international release, filmed at Avalon, lands of former fruit farms not a mile from my home, kick-started that quest. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio...”
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