Obituary: Sir Peter Shaffer, CBE, playwright
Born: 15 May 1926, Liverpool. Died: 6 June 2016, Cork, Republic of Ireland, aged 90
Sir Peter Shaffer, a giant of post-war British theatre, wrote a string of hugely successful, award-winning plays, including philosophical dramas The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Equus and in particular Amadeus, which was turned into a film directed by Miloš Forman and won eight Academy Awards, including best picture and best adapted screenplay for Shaffer.
Respected as “one of the true greats of British theatre”, the ebullient Shaffer penned more than 18 plays and some of British theatre’s greatest performers took roles in them, including Dame Maggie Smith, Sir Ian McKellen, Dame Judi Dench, Christopher Plummer, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Sir Michael Gambon, Sir Derek Jacobi and Simon Callow.
Shaffer once remarked: “My plays all get a very strong reaction from the audience; that’s why one wants to write plays … I don’t set out to stir up controversy, you write plays because you can’t help it … but it’s true that my plays are often about revenge … it’s a very urgent theme in today’s life.”
Born in Liverpool in 1926 into a middle-class Jewish family, Peter Levin Shaffer was the youngest of twins born to Jack, an estate agent, and Reka. The boys became drawn to theatre during family trips to the Liverpool Playhouse, and Peter’s brother, Anthony, also became a playwright, achieving success with popular thriller Sleuth and later with the screenplays for the Alfred Hitchcock film Frenzy, and cult classic The Wicker Man.
Following the family’s move to London, the twins attended St Paul’s School after which they were conscripted as miners – known as “Bevin Boys” – in the Kent coal mines during the Second World War.
Peter recalled passing the long hours underground mentally rehearsing the tragic Shakespearian roles. Post-war, he won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read History and Anthony read Law. In 1951, Peter then moved to New York, working in a bookshop, a department store and the acquisitions department of the New York Public Library.
While in New York, he penned his play The Salt Land, about illegal Jewish immigrants to 1947 Palestine; it was produced on ITV in 1955.
On his return to the UK, Shaffer joined the sheet music publishers Boosey & Hawkes but left to concentrate on writing.
The gamble paid off and he established his reputation as a playwright in 1958, with Five Finger Exercise, performed at the Comedy Theatre, London, under the direction of Sir John Gielgud – having previously been rejected by the Royal Court as “unsuitable”.
The play, about the impact of a handsome young German tutor on a middle-class English household, was controversial because of its homosexual undertones, but it went on to win the Evening Standard Drama Award. When it transferred to New York in 1959, it was equally well received and landed Shaffer the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Foreign Play.
Other plays followed, including The Private Ear and the Public Eye, and by the early 1960s Shaffer was one of the West End theatre impresario Binkie Beaumont’s favoured dramatists. The National Theatre was established in 1963, and almost all of Shaffer’s subsequent plays were performed there.
His work was a unique mix of philosophical dramas and satirical comedies as portrayed in The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964) directed by John Dexter, which presents the tragic Spanish conquest of Peru. Shaffer’s stage direction, “They climb the Andes”, has gone into theatrical history. Dexter is reported to have loved it. “Delete that, Peter and I won’t do the play,” said the director.
The play saw arguably one of the National’s best casts – Robert Stephens, Robert Lang, Colin Blakeley – and sumptuous sets from Michael Annals. The ascent of the Andes symbolised the conquistadors’ morally destructive conquest and epitomised the territory Shaffer was determined to stake out as his own, what he called “the nearly abandoned kingdom of epic theatre”.