Word: atahuallpa
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...ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN. Tired philosophy and an undocumented personal interpretation of the relationship between Conquistador Pizarro and Inca Ruler Atahuallpa are injected into a historical spectacle that pleases visually but fails to satisfy dramatically...
Shaffer has not fallen into the trap of abstract debate, however. He explores his theme by dramatizing a segment of actual history-the Spaniards' conquest of Peru, and more specifically, the period 1529-1532 and the events surrounding the crucial confrontations between Pizarro the Conquistador and Atahuallpa the God-Become...
Shaffer has, however, departed in certain instances from Prescott. Some deviations are inconsequential details, but others are important. Shaffer has moved the murder of Atahuallpa's brother Huascar ahead in time. And he has made Pizarro eventually a more sympathetic character than emerges from Prescott, who rightly stated that "the treatment of Atahuallpa, from first to last, forms undoubtedly one of the darkest chapters in Spanish colonial history." But these changes are invariably justified dramaturgically, Shaffer has retained, compressed, omitted, and changed the right things to insure a better play...
...chief acting burden naturally falls on Christopher Plummer as Pizarro and David Carradine as Atahuallpa. Both performances are stunning. Now there are two kinds of excellent actor. One molds each role into an extension or variation of his own marked personality-like Gielgud, Hawkins, Mastroianni, Robards, Fonda. The other, and greater, is able to obliterate the self and mint an entirely fresh being-like Chaplin, Jouvet, Oliver Guinness, Brando. Plummer belongs to the second type. Having recently seen his Hamlet, Arturo Ui, and Pizarro, I just can't believe they were all played by the same...
...subtler conflict enmeshes Pizarro and Atahuallpa. The existential hero of nothingness encounters the Rousseauistic myth of the innocent child of nature, the noblest savage of them all. David Carradine plays the Inca with marmoreal stoicism, and Shaffer gives him a primitive sign-and-grunt language that sometimes reduces the son of the sun to the son of Tondeleyo. The cynic in Pizarro becomes enthralled by the savior in Atahuallpa, who has a shining conviction that his godhead will raise him from the dead. Pizarro dreads but courts the great Inca's murder. If Atahuallpa is resurrected, might not Christ...