Peter Shaffer’s fatal flaw

By Irving Wardle

The plays of Peter Shaffer, who died this month at the age of 90, will be remembered for some of the most audacious and visually imperishable events of the postwar British theatre. It is hard to think of any stage images to rank, say, with the modulation of the Inca masks from hope to tragic mourning at the end of “The Royal Hunt of the Sun”, or the transformation of actors into equine divinities in “Equus”. Playwriting, however, is a matter of words; and what you remember from these and other wonderful examples of Shaffer’s work is not the words but the pictures.

In the mid-fifties, when the art of playwriting was being widely re-invented, he made a thoroughly conventional start with a West End family comedy, “Five Finger Exercise” (1958). Immediately evident were its structural expertise, its deep affinity to music, and the weakness of its expressive language. All his subsequent work was conditioned by this frustrating trio of qualities. Shaffer knew his intended destination, but it was equally clear that he was not going to get there unaided. It was his great stroke of luck to find creative partners who helped him to work out the route.