Word: royalities
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Royal Hunt of the Sun, by Peter Shaffer. A huge heraldic signet bearing a black cross is pinned with ascetic severity to the rear wall of the stage. Suddenly, it begins to open like secret paneling. Triangular sections peel back, and tongues of gold lick the surrounding dark. In the center of the blazing disk, like a jeweled idol released from a total eclipse, stands the sun god, the Inca, immutable, glorious, incandescent. In another scene, bitter light stipples the Spanish soldiers' helmets and swords as they pantomime their nail-clawing ascent of the Andes, and the men seem...
...albatross in the form of a narrator, always an ill omen that the drama will be becalmed. He harangues the listener on the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church and the evils of war and plunder. His ultimate theme is that God is dead and life lacks meaning. Royal Hunt is a sort of Tiny Alice shorn of obscurantism and sent to Inca land...
...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...
Martin Gottfried is not one of those New York drama critics who can doom a play with a wince of his pen. Nor can he do much to keep a show running. When he took his seat last week at the opening of Peter Shaffer's Royal Hunt of the Sun (see THEATER), pseudo-savvy first-nighters did not point him out with a knowing air. He is, after all, no more than the man on the aisle for Women's Wear Daily, trade paper to the women's fashion industry. As such...
...knows what the man who founded Duluth, Minn., in 1679 looked like. Archives reveal little more than that he was a French voyageur named Daniel Greysolon, bore the title of Sieur Du Luth, served as foot captain in the Royal Guard, and became a friend of the Sioux Indians. To give him more substance, Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, 74, was asked to make a bronze of Du Luth. "Find a younger man," advised the sculptor...