Almost nothing about Shaffer's future could have been predicted from Five Finger Exercise, which derives much of its basic plot from Turgenev's A Month in the Country but remains much more pedestrian, with nothing like the same sensitivity to atmosphere or the same penetration below the surface of character, though the adolescent son, with whom Shaffer can empathize most easily, emerges in greater depth than the others. Still, it is an impressively solid piece of theatrical craftsmanship, with cleverly contrived tensions, plentiful opportunities for the actors to engage the audience's emotions and effective build-ups to slightly melodramatic climaxes….

The ambitious Royal Hunt of the Sun … was seriously overrated. Shaffer was trying to present the clash of two civilizations—the Incas and sixteenth-century Spain as represented by the Conquistadores. But the confrontation is mainly a verbal one between two men, Atahuallpa, the Sovereign Inca, and Pizarro, the conquistador who ends up as a convert to the Inca faith….

[In Royal Hunt of the Sun] Shaffer fails to produce dialogue that suggests the sixteenth century. The Narrator's speeches are better written than the dialogue but generally the language is lustreless, tumbling into clichés and even pleonasms like 'trapped in time's cage' when nothing less than poetry would take the strain Shaffer is putting on it.

Of course his courage is admirable in jettisoning naturalism so wholeheartedly…. Time and place are treated equally unrealistically: the action sometimes embraces two scenes going on in different locales. He uses mime and he borrows certain tricks of stylization from the Oriental theatre. He is aiming at total theatre…. The trouble is that instead of unifying to contribute to the same effect, the various elements make their effects separately and some of them are superfluous and distracting. (p. 61)

Many of the ideas behind the play are interesting, particularly the suggestion of an inevitable link between evangelist Christianity and acquisitiveness, but the strenuously epic nature of the form, the crowding of the characters and the congestion of the story-line leave Shaffer with no elbowroom to develop his ideas. The Battle of Shrivings … is hardly less ambitious but it is naturalistic in conception and planned so that the explicit discussion of ideas should be central to the action. The basic conflict is between two Weltanschauungs and again it is worked out in terms of a conflict between two men—an apparently saintlike pacifist philosopher, modelled unmistakably on Bertrand Russell, and an anti-liberal, anti-traditionalist poet. The tension holds until the end of Act One, when war is declared between the two men. Theatrically the possibilities are enormous. They have agreed that the old philosopher will be the loser if he throws the vindictive poet out of his house before the week-end is over and his own pacifist principles prevent him from hitting back. It may have been reckless of Shaffer to commit himself to writing dialogue for two intellectuals of this calibre, but at least it ought to have been possible for him to evolve a theatrically effective battle between them and to develop both characters during the course of it. But again he fails to fuse the action and the debate, imposing a schematic development on both protagonists. The philosopher loses faith in humanism while the poet, like Pizarro in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, ends up unconvincingly as a convert to the beliefs of his victim. (p. 62)