Word: pizarro
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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...
...mean to imply that this is a flawless work. There is, near the end of Act II, one abrupt and unmotivated shift in Pizarro's attitude that Shaffer failed to validate (Prescott didn't have the answer either). Also the Narrator can't seem to make up his mind whether the Spanish forces numbered...
...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...
...doubt that pervades the playgoer is whether the real Pizarro suffered any such metaphysical anguish. There is no proof that he did. A deeper doubt is raised by the playwright's view of all life as a bleak cheat. Most men have stronger human ties than Shaffer's hero, and they take life on faith, with an acceptance of what is good, bad and mortal about it. The flamboyant staging of Royal Hunt widens the spectator's eye, but the confrontation of two heroes and two civilizations compels neither cheers nor tears...