Shaffer, Peter Levin

Shaffer, Peter Levin (1926– ), English dramatist, whose first play Five Finger Exercise (1958), a naturalistic study of family tensions directed by Gielgud, had a great success in London (NY, 1959). It was followed by a double bill, The Private Ear and The Public Eye (1962; NY, 1963), with Maggie Smith in London, which also did well, and The Merry Roosters Panto (1963), written for Joan Littlewood. Shaffer's next play, The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964), an epic tragedy about the murder of the Aztec king Atahualpa by Pizarro, was first performed at Chichester and then by the National Theatre company and in New York, as was the one-act Black Comedy (1965), an ingenious farce in which most of the action is supposed to take place in the dark, although the stage is lit. In New York, and later in London, the latter was joined in a double bill with another one-acter, White Lies (NY, 1967; London, as The White Liars, 1968). In The Battle of Shrivings (1970) an elderly pacifist reminiscent of Bertrand Russell (played by Gielgud) was shown in conflict with an anti-liberal poet. Two later plays received high praise: Equus (1973; NY, 1974) deals with a stable-boy who blinds horses and his subsequent treatment by a psychiatrist; Amadeus (1979; NY, 1980) portrays the bitterness aroused in the composer Salieri by the genius of Mozart. After Yonadab (NT, 1985), based on an episode about two half-brothers taken from the Book of Samuel, he had another enormous hit with the comedy Lettice and Lovage (1987; NY, 1990), in which Maggie Smith played the fantasizing guide to a country house.

Shaffer's twin brother Anthony achieved an unexpected success with his first play Sleuth (London and NY, 1970) which his later plays, including Murderer (1975), did not equal.