Optional Supplemental/Background Information

The following information gives some contextual information about the play including details about the playwright and the history of the story and the original production. It is intended for you to use as much or as little as interests you and is in no way required for you to be familiar with it in regards to our discussions.

PLAYWRIGHT: Peter Shaffer

Peter Shaffer was one of the most successful British playwrights of the last few decades of the 20th Century. He is best known as a playwright for his four plays The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Black Comedy, Equus, and Amadeus. His plays are often theatrical spectacles as well as crucibles for opposing points of view which are frequently embodied by duelling characters portrayed by powerhouse actors. His work has been equally praised and derided by critics, usually either applauding his bold theatricality and complex structure as being in service to the story or castigating the clunkiness of his arguments against bombastic and overwrought presentation.

He won multiple Tony Awards for his plays and The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Equus, and Amadeus were all turned into successful films, with the latter winning Shaffer an Oscar for his adaptation and Best Picture for the film. Most of his plays were first produced by the National Theatre with the exception of The Gift of the Gorgon, which was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

His major dramatic works, The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Equus, Amadeus, and The Gift of the Gorgon, are built around a two-character struggle “between mind and body, intellect and emotion, rational modernity and primeval force”. He also incorporates the use of masks into each of these plays

He is also a serial reviser with Amadeus going through over 50 different drafts before finally opening.

• Career retrospective from The Guardian.

• Obituary from the New York Times.

• Obituary from The Guardian.

THE ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN

The Royal Hunt of the Sun was first produced in 1964 and was the National Theatre’s first world premiere and its first non-classical play. It was a historical epic about the conquering of the Incas by Pizarro. The play ran at the Old Vic for 105 performances at 97% capacity. It was mounted again in 2006 for Shaffer’s 80th birthday, this time in the Olivier Theatre and directed by Trevor Nunn.

Why did I write The Royal Hunt? To make colour? Yes. To make spectacle? Yes. To make magic? Yes —if the world isn’t too debased to convey the kind of excitement I believed could be still be created out of “total theatre”.

The “totality” of it was in my head for ages: not just the words, but jungle cries and ululations, metals and masks; the fantastic aparition of the pre-Colombian world . . . I did deeply want to create, by means both austere and rich . . . an experience that was entirely and only theatrical.

[The themes were] an encounter between European hope and Indian hopelessness, between Indian faith and European faithlessness. I saw the active iron of Spain between the passive feathers of Peru. The conflict of two immense and joyless powers.

There are echoes of Royal Hunt in the play-within-a-play Icons in Gift of the Gorgon.

BLACK COMEDY

Black Comedy is a one-act farce that probably has the greatest conceit of any farce except Noises Off. The story of the play is fairly inconsequential except that it involves a character who “borrows” his ritzy neighbor’s furniture and artwork to impress the father of his love interest. The play opens with five minutes of complete darkness on stage, though we can hear the actors giving their dialogue. Then suddenly we hear the record player stop and one of the characters says: “We’ve blown a fuse!” at which point the stage lights come up full and we see the actors moving around as if in darkness. The entire rest of the play takes place in visible darkness.

The play played at the Old Vic for 46 performances at 105% capacity (hello standing-room-only tickets) before transfering to the West End. A production of Miss Julie starring Maggie Smith had been scheduled to play at the Old Vic after a short stint at the Chichester Festival and, being a one-act play, it was determined that it needed to be paired with another short play to make a full evening. It was decided that Black Comedy, which had just been pitched as the idea for a play by Shaffer, would (weirdly) be paired with Miss Julie as the second half of the bill. The play was written by Shaffer in nine days, hurriedly directed, and opened without a preview to much anxiety by Shaffer. It starred Derek Jacobi, Albert Finney, and Maggie Smith, whose entrance he delayed to give her a longer break after Miss Julie. The play opened with a raucous and enthusiastic response.

From Shaffer on opening night regarding the man sitting in the seat in front of him:

He had a head like an enormous boiled egg . . . completely bald, grim-looking, and with an overcoat on, sweating on a summer night. I fixed on him. First there was nothing, then he began to laugh. I was watching the sleeves of his overcoat go up and down more and more. Finally, he fell out of his chair and began to crawl helplessly, saying “Stop it, please stop it . . .” in a kind of whisper to the cast. The best notice I’ve ever received.

EQUUS

Equus was a huge success for Peter Shaffer and for the National where it opened at the Old Vic in 1973 and played for 131 performances at 97% capacity. The play won multiple awards including the Tony Award for the New York production. It is also the first play by Shaffer to be presented using multiple time-frames and flashbacks, techniques he would use in both Amadeus and The Gift of the Gorgon.

The play stems from an account by a friend of Shaffer who told him of a 17-year-old boy who had blinded six horses in Suffolk. From that beginning, Shaffer wrote the story of a psychiatrist who has a young patient who committed a similar atrocity. What follows is a bit of a detective story (also like Amadeus and The Gift of the Gorgon) in which the psychiatrist tries to understand why the boy enacted such vilent acts. The tensions between the divine and the mortal, between reason and instinct, between action and stasis, lie at the heart of the play.

AMADEUS

Amadeus was Shaffer’s greatest success, both financially and critically. It opened in the Olivier in 1972 and ran for 129 performances to 98% capacity and broke every record at the National at the time. The play starred Paul Scofield, Simon Callow, and Felicity Kendall. The New York production went on to win the Tony Award for Best New Play.

The play is the story of Mozart as subjectively told in flashback by his chief rival, Salieri. At the beginning of the play we hear echoes that Salieri claims he had murdered Mozart. The rest of the play unfolds like a mystery, with the protagonist actually interrogating himself and the events to finally reveal the truth at the heart of the play. Again, this is a technique that is echoed in Equus and The Gift of the Gorgon.

As Dennis A Klein states in his survey of Shaffer’s works:

Amadeus is a veritable catalogue of the themes and motifs in Shaffer’s dramatic writing throughout his career. . . . There is a complexity of themes that involves worship and envy, genius and mediocrity, passion and divinity, trust and betrayal, and, finally, divine justice. All are intermingled and interdependent.

These themes are also at the core of The Gift of the Gorgon.

THE GIFT OF THE GORGON

The Gift of the Gorgon opened at The Pit Theatre in the Barbican in 1992 for a brief run and then transferred to The Wyndhams Theatre in the West End from March-July of 1993. (The Pit is a 164-seat studio space, while The Wyndhams is 799-seat traditional proscenium space.) The production starred Michael Pennington, Judi Dench, and Jeremy Northam. The play was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company and directed by Peter Hall, who also directed Amadeus. Hall had originally suggested The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Equus to Olivier as good pieces for the National, so he has a long career as advocate and champion of Peter Shaffer’s work. The play was nominated for Olivier Awards for New Play and for Judi Dench as Best Actress.

The play follows Philip Damson to a secluded Greek Island shortly after the grisley death of his father, controversial playwright Edward Damson. Philip desires to interview Edward’s wife, Helen, about his father, who he never met. After trying to disuade Philip, Helen finally relents and agrees, but only if Philip promises to complete his biography of Edward.

The Gift of the Gorgon, like its predecessors, is essentially a mystery story, where the plot revolves around the discovery of the motivations behind a horrible crime, but where the "whodunnit" aspect of the story is ultimately subsumed within larger moral and psychological issues.

To Edward, the theatre is his religion, one which he believes needs new priests who can make it blaze again. He wants Helen to be his savior. Edward sets up their relationship through a series of short theatrical dialogues between the Greek God Perseus (Edward), who slew Medusa, and Athena (Helen), the Goddess of wisdom and war. He needs her Helen to be the voice of wisdom, reason and moderation to his Perseus.

The play also shows scenes from three of Damson’s plays: Icons, Prerogative, and I.R.E. In all of the short scenes the actors are wearing masks remeniscent of the masks of the ancient Greek theatre. This was a perfect technique for Peter Hall, who had directed an accalimed production of Aeschylus’ The Oresteia on the Olivier Stage in the early 80’s. The play was presented as traditionally as possible including the extensive use of masks by the actors. It was a fascinating project and was filmed for presentation on the BBC. Below is the first part of the first play in that production Oresteia trilogy, Agamemnon. The quality is as would be expected from a television show in the early 1980’s. I present it to give an example of the use of masks in a way they were similarly used in The Gift of the Gorgon.