Word: shaffer
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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...
...dramatic chronicle of the encounter of the aging conquistador Francisco Pizarro and the young Inca emperor Atahuallpa, however, the play is mechanical, preachy, largely unaffecting and sometimes silly. Ancient Mariner style, Shaffer supplies his own 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...
...SHAFFER...
...author is a German named Peter Weiss, just one of the foreign playwrights likely to lend savor and distinction to the season. They include John Osborne, whose Inadmissible Evidence was compared flatteringly by British reviewers to his Look Back in Anger. Then there is Christopher Plummer in Peter Shaffer's The Royal Hunt of the Sun, a morality play and stage spectacular based on the conquistadores' betrayal of the Incas...
...master speaks. "There are only two great playwrights in Britain today -Terence Rattigan and myself. Perhaps Peter Shaffer is a third, but he doesn't really write enough. There has to be output, not just one or two plays. I have been in fashion, and people have said I have gone out of fashion. Beware of fashion. Staying power is what counts." Staying power Noel Coward surely has. He will be 65 this month. Less than a year ago, his doctor told him to take a thoroughgoing sabbatical, since he had been suffering from savage gastritis. So Coward slowed...