Ritual and the Sacred in Peter Shaffer's Theatre

Among post-1960 British dramatists, Peter Shaffer is in many ways a theatrical contrarian, a playwright who has consistently gone against the current, achieving tremendous popular success and considerable critical acclaim with plays whose subjects, strategies, and style are often quite the opposite of prevailing theatrical trends.1 While such playwrights as Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and David Storey explored the dramatic eloquence of the unspoken and understated (and perfected its theatrical potential), Shaffer created characters who speak with rhetorical flourish, articulating their concerns through frequently poetic images in soliloquies that are as emotionally intense and dramatically effective as any on the modem stage. Yet, in an age when theatrical discourse has often been dominated by angry outbursts of class-based frustration with the here-and-now, by anti-capitalist agitprop, and by various milder forms of social protest, Shaffer’s plays avoid such topical sociopolitical commentary. They have, in fact, often depicted the not-here and not-now, with subjects that are as diverse and seemingly as remote from contemporary issues as Pizarro’s conquest of the Incas and Antonio Salieri’s rivalry with Mozart. Even when his plays are set in modem English society, they are often fundamentally concemed with history, juxtaposing now-lost values of an intensely-lived (if idealised) past against the mundane exigencies of modem life. Consistently, his major characters resist - or at least rail against - the ordinary, the ‘average’, the ‘normal’, the ‘mere’. His plays are remarkable for their carefully balanced dialectical (and dialogic)structure, their revitalisation of on-stage ritual, and their uniquely theatrical flair.