Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Royal Hunt Of The Sun by Peter Shaffer The Royal Hunt Of The Sun by Peter Shaffer. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 658d63756c760d4e • Your IP : 188.246.226.140 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. The Royal Hunt Of The Sun by Peter Shaffer. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 658d63763b77cad4 • Your IP : 188.246.226.140 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Peter Shaffer wanted to make elaborate theatre – and he succeeded. F ew writers achieve the lucrative double of writing an international hit play that becomes a big-budget movie. Remarkably, though, Peter Shaffer achieved the feat in three successive decades: with The Royal Hunt of the Sun in the 1960s, Equus in the 70s and Amadeus in the 80s. Amadeus became one of the few theatrical sensations to be even more successful in cinemas, with Milos Forman’s adaptation winning eight Oscars in 1985. Shaffer’s share of the profits from these projects made him the most financially rewarded English playwright of the second half of the 20th century, although – perhaps partly because of his box-office record – the dramatist found it harder to achieve critical and academic approbation. Peter Hall, who directed Amadeus on stage, even suggested in his published diaries that the play, in which the mediocre composer Salieri is undermined by the arrival of the genius prodigy Mozart, was autobiographical. Mozart stood for a playwright of instinctive genius, such as Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter, in comparison with whom Shaffer considered himself to be a plodder. Whether or not this was true, Shaffer’s plays were better and more original than Salieri’s compositions; certainly, though, he was not a writer to whom plays came easily. Whereas the texts of Pinter and Beckett were premiered pretty much as typed, Shaffer’s were sculpted and shaped with the director, before and during rehearsals, from vast piles of overlong drafts. The usually courteous Paul Scofield exploded, when the writer arrived with yet more new speeches close to the opening of Amadeus: “I am not learning another single line!” Even when a show was a hit, the revisions continued. The first and second published editions of Amadeus have almost completely different second acts. Peter Shaffer in 2008. Photograph: Carmen Valino/PA. This lack of confidence in what he had written partly explained the falling-off of his career. Although the earlier sensations were revived – Daniel Radcliffe co-starring in Equus in 2007 – no new stage play was performed during the last 23 years of his life, although he confided to interviewers during that period that he was working on two, including a drama about the widows of famous composers. Another limitation on Shaffer’s reputation was a sense of thematic repetition. Set during the Spanish conquest of Peru in the 16th century, The Royal Hunt of the Sun explored man’s desire to worship gods. Equus, inspired by a friend’s recollection of a real-life case in which a stable boy blinded a number of horses, set a secularist psychiatrist against a teenager whose social and sexual confusions had led him to construct a perverted personal religion around horses. In Amadeus, the court composer Salieri, a faithful Catholic, is horrified to see the divine gift of musical genius granted to Mozart, an obscene libertine. By then, some critics were complaining that Shaffer had effectively dramatised the conflicts of God v Man and Apollo v Dionysus in three different settings. Those settings, though, were the point. The ideas – and even the words – in his major plays were to some extent incidental. First with John Dexter as director and then Hall, Shaffer created a theatre of grand visual and gestural spectacle. He was responsible for the second trickiest stage direction after Shakespeare’s “Exit, pursued by a bear” when he typed, in The Royal Hunt of the Sun, the line: “They cross the Andes.” “Fancy!” the theatrical impresario Binkie Beaumont is supposed to have exclaimed after reaching that instruction in the script and deciding to reject it. But the sentence was evidence of Shaffer’s conviction that theatre could and must match cinema for pictorial ambition. Dexter’s production of The Royal Hunt of the Sun – designed by Michael Annals – created a Technicolor theatre that included a huge, metal, petalled sun hung above the stage, actors in golden masks and a vast, unfurling scarlet carpet that represented a bloodbath. The Andes were also, in mime, crossed. What seemed to be a staging impossibility in Equus – the convincing presentation of horses – was achieved through the precise equine movement and noises of actors wearing chestnut-coloured tracksuits and wire-and-leather heads and hooves designed by John Napier. Amadeus at the National Theatre in 1980. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock. The grand rhetoric and visual spectacle of The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Equus had been pejoratively called “operatic” by some critics. Amadeus must be as close to a spoken opera as theatre has come. Shaping words into fugues and arias, the text resembles a libretto, while designer John Bury’s representation of 18th-century Vienna had a gilded grandiosity more common at the Royal Opera House than the National Theatre. Although Shaffer was often categorised as a “commercial” writer, the paradox was that his three most successful plays could only have been created with the resources and time available in subsidised venues; he also benefitted from the presence of a company of actors used to playing big, loud roles in the classical canon. Apart from the riches his production provided for the eyes, the other key to the Shaffer brand was that he wrote modern roles allowing great Shakespearean actors to use every note of their vocal instruments. In the three major plays, there is always at least one moment when the main character is given a page-long soliloquy. A highlight of the National Theatre’s 50th anniversary celebrations was an archive recording of Paul Scofield delivering one of Salieri’s rants against the God that had betrayed him. When Scofield declined to take the play to Broadway, another National and RSC stalwart, Ian McKellen, took over, while the part of the psychiatrist in Equus was played by a succession of heavyweight names including Alec McCowen, Anthony Hopkins and Richard Burton. On the rare occasions when Shaffer wrote female leads, they were played by Dames Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. Shaffer’s trilogy of theological and historical epics at the peak of his career was a surprise because he had started as a provider of domestic dramas and light comedies, starting with his 1958 debut Five Finger Exercise. The dramatist admitted that its portrait of a sexually confused young man serving as tutor to a wealthy English family was emotionally autobiographical. Shaffer was gay, although belonging to a generation of writers who, even after the removal of the legal jeopardy to homosexuality, neither wrote about the subject directly nor spoke about his private life in interviews, although, when the theatrical voice teacher Robert Leonard died in 1990, he was recorded in the New York Times’ obituary as “the companion of the playwright Peter Shaffer”. Some friends and colleagues considered it significant that Shaffer’s public playwriting career ended, soon after Robert’s death, with The Gift of the Gorgon (1991), a grief-stained piece about a playwright obsessed with the classics who loses his marbles in Greece. Shaffer’s identical twin brother, Anthony, wrote Sleuth, a 1970 whodunnit that ran for several years in London and on Broadway. In a conversation with Hall, quoted in his diaries, Shaffer refers to the instinctive competitiveness of twins – both men were tetchy when confused theatre-goers complimented them on the work of the other – and the obsession in Peter’s plays with internal and opposing dualities seems likely to have been encouraged by his sibling situation. The boys were born in Liverpool, although neither could ever plausibly have been regarded as a Liverpudlian writer. Their shared passion for theatre might be attributed to a prep school teacher who told what they later realised to be the plot of Hamlet in instalments on Friday afternoons, ending on a cliffhanger that left the boys eager all week to hear the next scene. After three years as a “Bevin boy” – one of the young men conscripted to work in the mines during the second world war – Peter went, alongside Anthony, to read history at Trinity College, Cambridge. In the early 1950s, three detective novels were published under the pseudonym “Peter Anthony” – including The Woman in the Wardrobe and Withered Murder – with the first written by Peter alone and the latter by the brothers in collaboration. Shaffer with actors Burt Lancaster, left, and Kirk Douglas, right. The playwright had won best adapted screenplay at the 1985 Oscars. Photograph: Anonymous/AP. On either side of The Royal Hunt of the Sun, he wrote two comic double bills: The Public Eye / The Private Ear (1962) and Black Comedy / White Liars (1967). Of these Black Comedy, still much performed in schools, is a sublime comic idea in which the usual rules of theatre lighting are reversed: when we can see the characters, they are behaving as if in darkness, but, when the lights are out, they act as if we can see them. During the decades of the grand rhetorical dramas, some friends of Shaffer tried to coax this lighter side out of hiding. Lettice and Lovage (1988), a comedy about two friends who wage a campaign against modern architecture and other manifestations of contemporary “mediocrity”, is dedicated to a colleague “who asked for a comedy”. Yet even this expert middlebrow entertainment – which ran for two years in the West End and a year on Broadway – dealt in stark dualities between characters and concepts: in this case, conservatism v modernism. So too had its much less successful predecessor, the Bible-derived Yonadab (1985), which marked the last of Shaffer’s four grandiloquent examinations for the National Theatre of man’s desire for the divine and delivered his first flop there. Shaffer once said, during rehearsals for The Royal Hunt of the Sun, that he realised that “it was my task in life to make elaborate pieces of theatre”. He spectacularly – in every sense – fulfilled that pledge. Return of the sun god. I t 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. "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. · The Royal Hunt of the Sun opens at the National Theatre, London SE1, on April 12. Box office: 020-7452 3000. The Royal Hunt of the Sun by Peter Shaffer. 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