Peter Shaffer

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Peter Shaffer World Literature Analysis

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Peter Shaffer’s plays are distinguished by a unique sense of theatrical design and structure and by a particular fascination with certain themes. One is the psychological conflict between the artistically gifted and the working lot. Although his plays depict the artistically gifted in a sympathetic manner, Shaffer seems to view creativity and imagination as dangerous attributes. His young, artistically gifted characters, such as Clive and Walter in Five Finger Exercise, Bob in Private Ear, Alan Strang in Equus, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Amadeus, exhibit more than a tendency toward self-destruction. Some of the other characters in these plays are simultaneously contemptuous and envious of the characters with artistic ability and sensitivity, unable to understand why the creative characters are different from other people. In Five Finger Exercise, for example, the obvious affection juxtaposed with a profound misunderstanding between father and son is a major point of contention within the family dynamic. In Amadeus, Antonio Salieri rails against a God who has rewarded an obscene boy (Mozart) with a superior gift that Salieri cannot hope to match, and the burnt-out psychiatrist in Equus, Martin Dysart, envies Alan’s ability to experience great emotions and passions.

Another dominant theme in Shaffer’s plays is a quest for religion versus spirituality. He examines the religion of the Incas in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Alan’s equine god in Equus, and biblical mores in Yonadab: The Watcher. Critics have noted that a particular recurrent character type is present in many of Shaffer’s best plays: older men, experiencing a crisis in faith, who are confronted with primitive impulses that only exacerbate their situations. Pizarro and Martin Ruiz in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Martin Dysart in Equus, Antonio Salieri in Amadeus, and Mark Askelon in Shrivings all experience profound dissatisfaction with their cultures and lives. Shaffer shows how modern society has failed to provide a constructive outlet for ritualistic worship. To compensate, Alan in Equus manages to fabricate his own subjective faith and a form of ritualistic worship out of his fascination with horses and his mother’s conventional Christianity.

Many of Shaffer’s characters are mythic figures set within the framework of ritual drama. This is especially evident in The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Equus, two plays structured upon quest figures. In The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Pizarro describes his mission as “God hunting,” and he views the Inca people as a primitive god in whom he wishes to believe. Like Dysart in Equus, Pizarro is fated to kill the god. Dysart and Pizarro are cynics, symbols of despair, and neither one succeeds in achieving his spiritual goal. Salieri is another despairing cynic who kills his young rival, whose talent he regards as godlike. It is Salieri’s fate to outlive his reputation and to grow old as a forgotten man confined to an asylum.

The victims of these plays are younger than their adversaries. The dramatic conflict on a larger plane is, in all instances, between innocence and experience. Atahuallpa, an Inca, trusts Pizarro; Alan Strang trusts Dysart, the doctor who will cure him by killing his spiritual potential; and the naïve Mozart trusts Salieri, who pretends to be his friend. In these plays there is conflict between the primitive and civilized worlds, with the suggestion that the first is bound to lose against the guile and treachery of the latter. In Amadeus the most devious character is the highly sophisticated Salieri. To a lesser degree, this dichotomy is depicted between the family and Walter in Five...

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Finger Exercise. It is the family members whom Walter trusts and, in the end, it is they who destroy him. The conflict of the civilized and restrained against the primitive and romantic may be seen as a facet of the general clash between experience and innocence.

Shaffer is highly skilled in constructing a distinctive theater of spectacle. He has managed to translate symbolic action effectively into theatrical presentation by working with director John Dexter, and Shaffer incorporated Dexter’s sets and props for Equus into the published text of the play. Many of Shaffer’s plays, particularly The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Equus, depend upon flexible, inventive designs to advance the productions. The two key actions of The Royal Hunt of the Sun are presented in mime—the ascent of Pizarro’s army into the Andes Mountains and the massacre of the Incas. The second of these actions, like the mutilation of the horses in Equus, would be repugnant if represented literally and naturalistically.

Some critics have pointed out that Shaffer’s plays are male-dominated, relegating women to the margins of the major conflict as wives, mothers, lovers, and sisters. This is certainly true of his early and major plays; however his later plays, notably Lettice and Lovage and The Gift of the Gorgon, present middle-aged female protagonists who are not dependent upon a male presence and are fully developed as characters with motivations, objectives, and independent choices. M. K. MacMurraugh-Kavanagh comments in her book Peter Shaffer: Theatre and Drama (1998) that they “emerge as finer human beings than the men with whom they deal since not only do they survive victimization at their hands, but they also refuse the option of vengeance against them.”

Shaffer has had the courage to take on large themes and has been criticized by some for being pretentious. He described The Royal Hunt of the Sun as being “about a man’s search for immortality,” explaining that the play was written to create spectacle and to make magic, “to convey the kind of excitement I believed could still be created out of ’total’ theatre.” In writing for the stage, Shaffer intends to create “an experience . . . entirely and only theatrical.” Few would argue that he achieved this goal most successfully with Equus.

What is perhaps most remarkable about Shaffer’s work is his innate understanding of the medium for which he is writing. Having written novels, teleplays, radio plays, stage plays, and screenplays, his understanding of what makes a work successful cinematically versus theatrically is a rare talent. His own film adaptation of Amadeus is probably the best example of his abilities in this area. Overall, however, Shaffer will be remembered first and foremost as a playwright. He has made theatrical magic, questioned the values of the contemporary world, and pursued lost myths and rituals in an impressive canon of work. Through his plays Shaffer has reminded audiences of what the theater is about—ritual representation of human ideals and aspirations.

Five Finger Exercise

First produced: 1958 (first published, 1958)

Type of work: Play

A family is forced to deal with undercurrents of resentment when a visiting tutor brings their emotions to the surface.

Originally titled Retreats, the current title, Five Finger Exercise, is a clever and symbolic reference to a piano exercise for pianists. The play has five characters that must “exorcise” their conflicts, and piano music is used throughout to underscore and punctuate dramatically heightened moments. Shaffer has admitted the autobiographical nature of the play, stating in the preface to his collected plays that it “expressed a great deal of my own family tensions and also a desperate need to stop feeling invisible.”

The play focuses on the Harrington family, who are spending a holiday together in their cottage in Suffolk, England. There is a snobbish mother, Louise, who fancies herself a Parisian aristocrat; a working class father, Stanley, who has done quite well for himself and his family in the furniture business; a troubled and sensitive son, Clive, who is just entering college, drinks too much, and is trying to find himself; and a smart-mouthed, feisty, fourteen-year-old daughter, Pamela. The fifth character is a young German music tutor, Walter, employed by the Harringtons to teach Pamela to play piano.

Walter acts as a catalyst for the family in bringing their underlying resentments out into the open for discussion and resolution. Louise resents Stanley for stifling her creative nature, while Stanley dismisses Clive’s yearning for something more fulfilling than making furniture. Pamela thinks her brother is spoiled, and Clive feels unappreciated and misunderstood by his father. Walter, however, expresses only happiness and gratitude that he has found a family and a safe place to live. In conversations with each family member, Walter helps them see their situations more objectively, which helps them find solutions to their problems. He is the model of what Clive should become: an independent, self-sufficient, educated, and artistic young man, who is comfortable with himself.

Clive is jealous of his mother’s attentions toward Walter and tells his father that they are having an affair, but he later regrets it when Walter proves to be his true friend. Once Louise and Stanley agree to go away together in an effort to save their marriage, Louise turns against Walter and asks Stanley to dismiss him. Although Walter begs to stay with the family, they remain firm, blaming Walter for their children’s problems.

While Walter plays his gramophone upstairs, Louise learns about Clive’s lie and rejects his apology. In the midst of their argument, Walter’s record skips, and when Stanley knocks on his door he discovers that Walter has attempted to commit suicide by turning on the gas in his room. The others galvanize to save him, as they seem to suddenly realize what Walter has done for them, and he is resuscitated. The play ends with Clive praying for courage, which Gene A. Plunka, in his book Peter Shaffer: Roles, Rites, and Rituals in the Theater (1988), defines as “adhering to one’s own norms and values no matter how different they are from the . . . accepted societal mores and standards.”

This play deals in part with the difference between the truly artistic, romantic, and sensitive versus those who do not understand them. Shaffer explores this theme again in Private Ear and most effectively in Equus, when creativity and theatricality in his playwriting reach a summit.

The Royal Hunt of the Sun

First produced: 1964 (first published, 1964)

Type of work: Play

The play dramatizes Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Incas, his search for the fabled city of gold, and his extending the frontiers of the Spanish empire.

“This story is about ruin,” says Martin Ruiz at the beginning. Old Martin, a soldier of Spain now worth millions, serves as the chorus, telling the story of how Francisco Pizarro, a man in his sixties, managed to conquer an empire of twenty-four million Incans with an expeditionary army of one hundred and sixty-seven men. Ruiz regrets the day he first set eyes upon Pizarro.

The action then goes back forty years, when Pizarro is recruiting soldiers in Spain for his Peruvian expedition. Young Martin, at the age of fifteen, is schooled in the codes of chivalry and is an idealistic advocate of his king and religion. He eagerly enlists his services. The next scene introduces the churchmen: Valverde, the Dominican chaplain; his associate, the Franciscan de Nizza; Pedro de Candia, cavalier from Venice, in charge of weapons; and the arrogant Miguel Estete, overseer in the name of King Carlos who threatens to challenge Pizarro’s authority in the New World. The expedition departs into the forest.

The third scene introduces the God-king Atahuallpa, sovereign Inca of Peru; Villac Umu, his high priest; and Challcuchima, his general. Atahuallpa believes the white god is coming to bless him. This naïve belief will be his undoing.

The action alternates between the Inca court, fortified high in the mountains, and the approaching Spanish army. After six weeks, the army passes through the forest and arrives at the border of the Inca Empire, finding a road fifteen feet wide. The army is met there by the Incan General Challcuchima, who brings commands that the Spaniards should visit the God-king at Cajamaarca, a month’s march up into the mountains. After the Spaniards arrive, the sovereign Inca demands to see their god, whom he believes to be Pizarro. Valverde, angered by this blasphemy, orders Pizarro to attack. The first act ends with the mime of the great massacre. The Incans are massacred and Atahuallpa is taken hostage. Pizarro crowns himself king.

Act 2, “The Kill,” is about the conflict between Pizarro and the captive Atahuallpa, who still has the power and authority to crush Pizarro and his army. Communication is at first complicated by Felipillo, the treacherous Incan interpreter, who lusts after the Inca’s wife, but young Martin has learned enough of the Incan language to recognize Felipillo’s deceit and advises Pizarro. The tactful and honest Martin from that point forward becomes the interpreter, and he is therefore “privy to everything that passed between them during the next months.”

Pizarro, a cynic mainly interested in plunder, promises to set Atahuallpa free if the Inca will fill with gold a room twenty-two feet long by seventeen feet wide. The trusting Atahuallpa commands that the gold be gathered from across his empire. Coming from a more honest culture, he does not entertain thoughts of Spanish treachery. During the time required to accumulate this treasure, Atahuallpa debates the nature of divinity with the churchmen and the nature of kingship with Pizarro.

The Spaniards put pressure on Pizarro to kill the Inca, which he would rather not do. Pizarro soon realizes, however, that his reputation as conqueror will only be assured if he murders his Incan counterpart. Atahuallpa calmly believes he cannot be killed because of his divinity. He tells the sixty-three-year-old Pizarro: “You will die soon and you do not believe in your god. That is why you tremble and keep no word. Believe in me.” Torn between desire and duty, Pizarro finally allows a Spanish court to accuse Atahuallpa “of usurping the throne and killing his brother; of idolatry and having more than one wife.” The God-king is found guilty and murdered, failing the ultimate test of his divinity. Pizarro curiously seems to want to believe in Atahuallpa’s divinity and is devastated.

Equus

First produced: 1973 (first published, 1973)

Type of work: Play

A magistrate calls upon a skilled psychiatrist, Martin Dysart, to treat an adolescent boy who has blinded six horses with a metal spike.

The success of Equus was attributable partly to the staging designed by John Dexter, who has also directed Black Comedy and The Royal Hunt of the Sun. Dexter helped Shaffer visualize the abstractions that give the play its power and the rituals that inform the play’s spectacle. The play is about madness, and Shaffer manages to dramatize the fantasies of a disturbed boy’s mind, as well as the frustrations of the psychiatrist, Martin Dysart, who is asked by his friend Hesther Salomon to cure the boy who has, for no apparent reason, blinded the horses.

Act 1 is a search for motive and meaning as Dysart interviews the boy and his parents. The boy is at first uncooperative but later comes to trust Dysart and reveals his psychological secrets. Using hypnosis, Dysart gets the boy to remember the experience and manages to put the boy on the road to recovery. Dysart seriously questions, however, whether he should treat the boy at all. The boy, Alan Strang, has a vitality and twisted imagination that fascinate the doctor. Dysart questions whether he should rob Alan of his uniqueness and make him normal, which is to say, ordinary. The play is shaped by Dysart’s monologues and by two spectacles, Alan’s “wild midnight ride” at the end of act 1 and his blinding of the horses at the climax of act 2.

Alan is a friendless loner, ignored by his parents. His worship of horses is solitary, not communal, reflecting Shaffer’s own distaste for organized religion. Dysart becomes the boy’s spiritual father, recalling the story of Abraham and Isaac as he sacrifices Alan to social norms. Alan trusts Dysart as his spiritual father, just as Isaac trusted Abraham, but Abraham trusted his God, as Dysart does not. The obedient Abraham is far different from the doubting Dysart; the parable is twisted to fit a new context. There are also biblical echoes of the Book of Revelations in Alan’s incantations during his midnight ride.

The themes of Equus are primitive and elemental (worship, passion, and bestiality), psychosexual (masturbation, sexual frustration, and confusion), contemporary (professional burnout and the dysfunctional family), and ethical (the duty of the doctor to heal and to alleviate pain). All the male characters seem to have sexual problems. Alan and Dysart seem to have a problem in the way they relate to women. Frank, Alan’s father, frequents pornographic film houses.

The key theme of Equus is reiterated by Dysart in his mad and rambling monologue that begins and ends the play: “Extremity is the point.” Dysart is driven to distraction by what Shaffer has described as the “continuous tension” between “the Apollonian and the Dionysian,” symbolized by Dysart and Alan, and between “the violence of instinct and the desire for order and restraint.”

Amadeus

First produced: 1979 (first published, 1980)

Type of work: Play

Composer Antonio Salieri feels threatened by the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and plots to destroy him out of spite and jealousy.

Shaffer has described Amadeus as “a fantasia on Mozartian themes.” The play is not a documentary biography, but Shaffer asserts that many of the elements of the play are true and that in no way has the specific nature of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart the man or the composer been violated. On the other hand, one might protest that the Italian composer Antonio Salieri has been slandered by the drama.

The play is set in the imperial Austrian court in Vienna, musically dominated by Italians, foremost of whom is the court composer Salieri, who has pledged his soul to God in hopes of becoming the greatest composer of his age. Salieri has the ear of his emperor, but he is ironically forced by his own understanding of music to recognize a far greater talent in the foul-mouthed, vulgar libertine, Mozart, who is capable of creating music of sublime beauty.

The action is framed by the demented recollections of Salieri at the end of his life, in 1823. He is no longer a famous composer but a forgotten man made bitter and crazy by envy and cynicism. Salieri’s story begins in 1781, when Mozart performs for the archbishop of Salzburg. From that point on Salieri does everything in his power to conspire against Mozart and block his advancement at court. He hires a maid who spies on Mozart and reveals family secrets. After Mozart’s estranged father, Leopold, dies, Salieri, after seeing a production of the opera Don Giovanni, understands the composer’s sense of grief and guilt over his father’s death and devises a demoniac plan that brings Mozart to the point of exhaustion and death.

The set for the play is abstract, a rectangle of wood set into blue plastic. It serves as Salieri’s salon, Mozart’s apartment, reception rooms, and opera houses. In addition, there is an upstage playing space enclosed by a proscenium that Shaffer describes as a light box, a useful device for theatrical trickery. Action originally designed for this space had to be modified for the film adaptation. For the screenplay, Shaffer also had to reinvent the play’s opening, provided by a chorus of voices of the citizens of Vienna. His solution was to begin with Salieri’s slashing his throat, which comes at the end of the original play’s text, and to frame the story with Salieri’s account of his dealings with Mozart. The film version creates a first impression of incoherent madness. The madness becomes more rational and controlled as Salieri tells his story to a bewildered and shocked priest, gradually building in intensity toward a climax of renewed madness. The old, mad Salieri finally calls out: “Forgive me, Mozart! Forgive your assassin!”

Even though the London production of 1979 proved to be the most popular play ever mounted by the National Theatre to that time, Shaffer, ever the perfectionist, continued to revise the play before its New York opening. “One of the faults,” Shaffer notes in the preface to the American edition, was “that Salieri had little to do with Mozart’s ruin.” The American version puts Salieri “where he properly belonged—at the wicked center of the action.” Later still, Shaffer revised the script all over again for the film version, creating one of the most remarkable film adaptations in the history of cinema. The film won eight Academy Awards.

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Peter Shaffer Drama Analysis