Word: shaffers
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AUTHOR: PETER SHAFFER...
...case against Peter Shaffer is well established. Shaffer himself has presented it, in such hugely successful plays as Equus (1973), Amadeus (1979) and Lettice and Lovage (1987). He is stagy, melodramatic, given to portentous evocations of myth, an obsessive juggler of the duality between head and heart, reason and inspiration, ordered restraint and exalted excess. Of course the same plays, viewed from another angle, make a strong case in Shaffer's favor. He is intensely theatrical, intellectually provocative, inventive with plot and setting despite the single-mindedness of his themes -- in short, entertaining and fascinating even at his most over...
...play Shaffer, 67, characteristically makes no attempt to resolve his contradictions or modify his extremes. If anything he defiantly offers more of both, as if he had taken a motto from William Blake: "You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough." The Gift of the Gorgon, a Royal Shakespeare Company production that will open a limited run in the West End next week after three months at the RSC's base in the Barbican Center, is drenched in stage blood, Greek mythology and high rhetoric about creativity, violence and justice. Once again, Shaffer somehow...
...device is rather labored, but in Peter Hall's brilliant production -- complete with stylized masked figures pantomiming the mythological background -- the action it encompasses builds to a fierce momentum. Pennington and particularly Dench perform with such conviction that one forgets there is anything preposterous about their characters. This time Shaffer does not stack the deck in his perennial intellect-ecstasy debate but leaves the outcome ambiguous. In a gory, disturbing finale, both Edward and Helen must plumb, in their ways, the terrible meaning of the Perseus legend: that the slayer of the Gorgon becomes the thing he or she destroys...
IMAGING: Mark Stelzner (Manager); Gerard Abrahamsen, Lois Rubenstein (Supervisors); Steven Cadicamo, Charlotte Coco, John Dragonetti, Raphael Joa, Kin Wah Lam, Carl Leidig, Linda Parker, Robert Pfleger, Mark P. Polomski, Richard Shaffer, David Spatz, Lorri Stenton, Paul White