Two Good Plays

Some time ago I reviewed in these columns two earlier plays by Peter Shaffer, and expressed the opinion that they were on the whole showy and superficial. There was in fact hardly a flicker in them of the wisdom and tragic acceptance of life which lie behind every word of The Royal Hunt of the Sun. In other hands I am sure this play would have become a mere pageant, one of those works of historical journalism which clutter our schoolrooms; but Mr Shaffer has avoided by a miracle the dead hand of reportage.

The narrative of Pizarro’s conquest of Peru, and the treacherous execution of the Inca Atahuallpa, grows in his charge to a dramatic discourse of great imaginative power, in which the Christian and primitive non-Christian religious symbols clash and mingle. The Pizarro of the play is mesmerised less by gold than by the myth of a life in accord with nature which the Incas seem to offer. Mr Shaffer has made a profound allegory of the solitude of Western man and his recurrent dream of the garden of irrecoverable innocence. The play reads as if it could be staged magnificently.

John Osborne is acknowledged to be one of the best, perhaps the best contemporary English playwright. He has increasingly made use of the technique of a stream of consciousness in his dialogues, without approaching incoherence. Inadmissible Evidence has as its hero a middle-aged decaying lawyer, unfaithful to his wife, but faithful to some inner sense of human vitality and dignity. I find the play both moving and authentic. With a cast of eight, predominantly female, it should be able to be staged easily by any good amateur group.

1965 (354)