Word: shaffer
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...Peter Shaffer, whose succès de spectacle was The Royal Hunt of the Sun, plays a labored game of "hound the humanist" in The Battle of Shrivings. Sir Gideon Petrie (John Gielgud) is an aged, Bertrand Russell-like champion of rationalism living ascetically at Shrivings, a converted medieval abbey in the Cotswold Hills. From there he guides a peace movement and blandly preaches the perfectibility of human nature to youthful acolytes and to his wife (Wendy Hiller), with whom he renounced sex, on principle...
Shaw Without Shaw. The challenge is fascinating, but Sir Gideon courts disaster in accepting it. So does Playwright Shaffer. Shrivings is a Shaw play without Shaw. Where the master could have whirled the philosopher to triumph in a blaze of intellectual toughness and passion, Shaffer slips the poet the victory with too little of either. In the end, Sir Gideon is forced to throw out everything except Askelon in a battle that is not so much pitched as rigged. Gielgud lends the part a tremulous, blinking dignity, but he can only play it the way Shaffer wrote...
Credibility does not really count in Sleufh, by Anthony Shaffer, a television and movie writer who has sometimes collaborated with Brother Peter on detective novels. Sleuth reflects no real world, only the glints of its own inner harmonies. It is all a diabolical plot, and the first to be overthrown by it are the reviewers, for there is no way to describe it without giving away its secrets. It can only be said that its protagonist, a successful whodunit writer named Andrew Wyke (Anthony Quayle), is a witty snob who is inwardly delighted when a would-be lover makes...
Taut and literate as Shaffer's entertainment is, it could have been merely another of those theatrical arabesques that fade as quickly as the footlights. Two things redeem it from such slickness. The stylish gusto of Baxter and especially of Quayle give the whole performance an edge that could cut glass. Moreover, Shaffer manages deftly to satirize the detective genre at the same time that he constructs a classic model of it. His satire brings out a hint of desperation behind the characters' capering. Ultimately his sport is directed against the games-playing mentality itself, with its retreat...
...Peter Shaffer's reach exceeds his grasp in Shrivings, Anthony Shaffer's grasp is so sure in Sleuth that the playgoer may well wish he had reached farther. In fact, it is tempting to find a moral in this-but drawing morals can be too facile a game...