At 80, Peter Shaffer looks back

>From the Guardian:

                
Return of the sun god

To celebrate Peter Shaffer's 80th birthday, the National is reviving
The Royal Hunt of the Sun. He tells Michael Billington why the play,
the first of a string of revolutionary works, is as relevant now as it
was in 1964

Wednesday April 5, 2006
The Guardian

'Art and literature are my surrogate religions' ... Peter Shaffer. 
 
It is hard to understand now the shock The Royal Hunt of the Sun
caused in 1964. Here was a stylised historic spectacle dealing with
conquests, massacres, Inca sun-gods and looted gold in a theatre
dominated by Beckettesque minimalism and box-set naturalism. Indeed,
Peter Shaffer himself, through West End hits such as Five Finger
Exercise and The Private Ear and the Public Eye, had become the
favoured dramatist of Binkie Beaumont, who ran the Shaftesbury Avenue
firm of HM Tennent like a quality grocers. So it was perfectly natural
that Shaffer would send his new play to Beaumont.

Article continues
"I was staying at Binkie's country cottage for a weekend," says
Shaffer, "having heard nothing from him about the play. I went to get
myself a drink and was just about to go into the main room when I
overheard Binkie and his partner, John Perry, discussing it. I heard
John say to Binkie, 'And then the Spanish soldiers go up the Andes.'
And Binkie said 'They do what?' John replied 'They climb the Andes,
dear.' 'And what do they do then?' asked Binkie. 'They climb down the
other side,' said John. To which Binkie simply said 'Fancy!' At that
moment I thought perhaps I hadn't sent the play to the right management."

But the stage direction that horrified Beaumont excited the
imagination of John Dexter, who ultimately directed the play for the
National at Chichester. Dexter was a combative genius who, as Shaffer
acutely remembers, always had a note of challenge in his voice.

"Dexter rang me, told me he'd read my play and liked it. He said he
was busy directing Larry [Olivier] in Othello but would be with me the
next Saturday to read act one of the Royal Hunt aloud and the
following week to read act two. I said I supposed that would be
helpful. Dexter said, 'If I do it, it will be.' And so it was, with
John inviting me to give notes after each scene. But just before we
got to the moment where the conquistadors climb the Andes, I said I
ought to say a word about the next page. Dexter instantly said, 'If
you take that line out, I'm not directing.' Dexter was sending me a
message that he was the right man for the job and actively embraced
the break with naturalism."

The Royal Hunt of the Sun deals with the violent Spanish conquest of
Peru and a clash of civilisations. In light of the American invasion
of Iraq, has it become a different play today? Less exotic, more
political?

"The political resonance was always there," says Shaffer, a little
deaf as he nears 80 but still boyishly high on the adrenaline kick of
rehearsal. "The Spanish said they were going to save the Incas from
savagery and idolatry and make their life better because they'd have
Christ: today we offer democracy as a panacea. And, while the
conquistadors were blatant in their admission of greed, today the need
for oil has replaced the hunger for gold. I'd be willing to bet that
any incursion throughout history in which the invading country has
proclaimed it is bringing benefits to the conquered is based on a lie.

"Far from learning anything from Inca society - which, although very
static, had a pension system unknown in Europe at the time - the
Spaniards also committed unbelievable acts of destruction. People who
had landowning status before were sent down the mines, and all the
best perks went to the new rulers. Aesthetically, all the great
achievements of Inca gold and silverwork virtually disappeared. In
much the same way, Baghdad's museum treasures have been vandalised
under American occupation."

It will be fascinating to see to what extent Trevor Nunn's new Olivier
production combines emblematic spectacle with political inference.
Nunn starts with the advantage of never having seen Dexter's original
and with the presence of two fine actors, Alun Armstrong and Paterson
Joseph, as the conquering Pizarro and the Inca sun-god, Atahualpa.

Not only did The Royal Hunt liberate Shaffer from naturalism, it also
set the pattern for later plays such as Equus, Amadeus and Yonadab, in
which an envious, rationalist outsider yearns for the instinctual
ecstasy unjustly bestowed on another. But how much does this recurring
conflict between Apollo and Dionysos stem from Shaffer's own life?

"I was brought up in an Orthodox Jewish household," says Shaffer. "I
don't think I ever had a single discussion with my parents about
faith. It was just something gently imposed. It was strangely cosy and
reassuring but I can't say I lost my faith because I never really had
it in the first place. It was more a matter of going through the
observances. As for the conflict between the Apollonian and the
Dionysiac, I admit that it's an obsessive thing, but I suppose part of
me is always looking for a pre-selected meeting of opposites even if
they're not always antithetical. You can have a conflict between two
different kinds of right."

It is not difficult to translate Shaffer's childhood religious
memories into a passion for theatrical ritual. But the capacity for
envy that drives the psychiatrist in Equus, or Salieri in Amadeus, is
more obviously personal, and something of which Shaffer speaks with
silvery candour.

"It's an enactment", he says, "of my own internal tension. A part of
me is always envious of people who live in the present and are
sustained by a sense of spontaneity. Even dogs have that capacity:
they're always wanting to participate in something and I don't often
have that element in me. But I envy people who can dissolve themselves
in the moment and surrender to their Dionysiac instinct. I also live
between the twin poles of admiring both ardent rationalists and
sincere believers, though one has to be careful about what one is
admiring: I've known fanatics who lead incredibly narrow, warped
lives. But I do envy people of a quiet and lambent faith. I can't
remember who wrote that. Perhaps I did?"

Intriguingly, that sense of emotional detachment that haunts Shaffer
finds its echo in many other modern dramatists: Simon Gray,
Christopher Hampton and Tom Stoppard most prominently. It also clearly
reverberates with audiences around the world. But, if Shaffer
expresses the dilemma of the self-critical observer envious of the
scientific and religious certainty of others, he has his own
compensations.

"Art and literature," he says enthusiastically, "are my surrogate
religions. I find in Mozart that ecstasy I don't find in codified
faith. I also find in reading - and even sometimes seeing -
Shakespeare that same pleasure in perfection I discover in Mozart.
When I read the last act of Antony and Cleopatra and that speech
beginning 'The crown of the earth doth melt' I feel I'm encountering
one of the great achievements of mankind. It's a beacon somehow, a
reminder that there is a perfection of art - whereas I don't think
there is a perfection of religion. I wish I could say I found this in
the theatre. Not so long ago I saw Troilus and Cressida, and when we
got to: 'The time scants us with a single famished kiss, Distasted
with the salt of broken tears', there was no sense of the actor being
aware of the lines he was privileged to say."

If Shaffer finds in Shakespeare that transcendence he can't find in
religion, he is not alone. But Shakespeare also possesses another of
Shaffer's most prized qualities: narrative excitement. In fact,
Shaffer tells a great story about a schoolmaster he encountered when
he was nine. It was a gloomy, wet Friday afternoon and the teacher
offered to tell the class a ghost story. It began on windswept
battlements at midnight. A ghost appeared in chainmail and told the
hero that he didn't die a natural death but was murdered by his
brother. On went the story to the point where the murder was about to
be re-enacted in front of the brother, who was now king. At which
point the teacher broke off and said, "Good heavens, it's three
o'clock. We'll have to finish this next Friday."

"I suggest," says Shaffer, "this was the best piece of education I
ever had in my life. I had no idea this was a play called Hamlet. The
point was that neither I - nor the rest of the class - could wait till
the next Friday. I became respectful of narrative and great stories
through Shakespeare. I hate it when Brecht says that we should not be
interested in the next scene because it distracts us from the current
one. I find that priggish and tedious. I want to be enthralled and
Shakespeare teaches one an immense amount about how to organise a
story; or sometimes how not to. I've always felt Much Ado About
Nothing badly needs a rewrite."

In that sense, Peter Shaffer is a traditional writer: a story-teller
who learned the craft of narrative by studying Shakespeare but also by
co-writing three detective novels with his twin brother, Anthony. One
of them, Withered Murder, even has a Shakespearean ring to it. But in
another way, Shaffer is the very antithesis of the safe, commercial
dramatist. The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Equus and Amadeus brought
ritual, magic, music and choreographed movement back into a theatre
that was in danger of succumbing to monochrome naturalism. Shaffer has
created his own particular, paradoxical niche: that of the popular
experimenter and the doubting rationalist yearning for a god in whom
he can't finally believe.






 
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