"You never quite know what's going to strike your imagination, or something that won't going to leave you alone, not going to leave alone, and this was one for me." -- Peter Shaffer
Sir Peter Levin Shaffer (born 15 May 1926) is an English dramatist, author of numerous award-winning plays, several of which have been filmed.
"And in fact, I think one of the best guides to telling you who you are, and I think children use it all the time for this purpose, is fantasy.""Black Comedy is a farce that is played in the dark, as you know, with the lights full on. It's the Chinese convention of reversing light and dark, and exactly where anybody is at any given moment is the play.""But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.""Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.""I made, over the years in Cambridge, several very good American friends, and America appeared to me, a land of promise in every sense of that word, a land of freedom from the inhibitions and restrictions that I felt in England.""I really believe that studying organization, even in the form of studying detective story organization, is very, very valuable for a playwright, a budding playwright.""I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did.""I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything.""I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he's writing about. I think, you just can't move them about, you know.""I think possibly the first film that has music as its leading character.""I was an accomplice in my own frustration.""I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life.""If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.""It is very, very difficult for a playwright to write a scene in which a young man has his first deep experience of sex with a girl whom he found immensely attractive, is fully satisfied by this event and gets up and blinds a lot of horses.""It's an extraordinary thing about Mozart is that you never tire of him... he never bores me, and he doesn't... not only bore me, that's too strong a word.""Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.""My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.""Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.""Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.""They look so expectant, and then they look so depressed... that was the other great lesson that The Royal Hunt of the Sun taught me, it was the profundity that masked drama can achieve, that of course, the audience were not seeing masks moving at all.""Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right.""Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.""We... our war began September the 3rd 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany, and thereafter the great state of danger in England at that time, with the bombings, necessitated the evacuation of children.""You can't always let people do their own thing."
Shaffer was born to a Jewish family in Liverpool, the son of Reka (née Fredman) and Jack Shaffer, who was an estate agent. He is the twin brother of another playwright, Anthony Shaffer.
He was educated at St Paul's School and subsequently he gained a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge to study history. Shaffer was a Bevin Boy coal miner during WW2 and took a number of jobs including bookstore clerk, and assistant at the New York Public Library, before discovering his dramatic talents.
Shaffer's first play, The Salt Land (1954), was presented on the BBC. Encouraged by this success, Shaffer continued to write and established his reputation as a playwright in 1958 with the production of Five Finger Exercise which opened in London under the direction of John Gielgud and won the Evening Standard Drama Award. When Five Finger Exercise moved to New York in 1959, it was equally well-received and landed Shaffer the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Play.
Shaffer's canon contains a unique mix of philosophical dramas and satirical comedies. The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964) presents the tragic conquest of Peru by the Spanish, while Black Comedy (1965) takes a humorous look at the antics of a group of characters feeling their way around a pitch black room ... although the stage is actually flooded with light.
Equus (1973) won Shaffer the 1975 Tony Award for Best Play as well as the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. A journey into the mind of a 17-year-old stableboy who had plunged a spike into the eyes of six horses, Equus ran for over 1000 performances on Broadway and has been revived by Massachusetts' Berkshire Theatre Festival in the summer of 2005, staged by Scott Schwartz (son of composer Steven Schwartz), with Victor Slezak as Dr Martin Dysart and Randy Harrison as Alan Strang. (Roberta Maxwell, who originated the role of Jill, Alan's would-be girlfriend, in the original Broadway production in the 1970s, played a judge in this revival.) and in 2007, with Richard Griffiths and Daniel Radcliffe in the leading roles. The play was directed by Thea Sharrock, and opened in London in February 2007 at the Gielgud Theater. The casting of Radcliffe, still associated with films intended for general audiences, caused some controversy, since the role of Alan Strang required him to appear naked on stage.
Shaffer followed this success with Amadeus (1979) which won the Evening Standard Drama Award and the Theatre Critics Award for the London production. Amadeus tells the story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and court composer Antonio Salieri who, overcome with jealousy at hearing the "voice of God" coming from an "obscene child," sets out to destroy his rival. When the show moved to Broadway, it won the 1981 Tony Award for Best Play and, like Equus, ran for more than 1000 performances.
Several of Shaffer's plays have been adapted to film, including Five Finger Exercise (1962), The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969), Equus (1977), and Amadeus (1984), which won eight Academy Awards including Best Picture.
Shaffer received two Academy Award—nominations for adapting his plays "Equus" and "Amadeus" for the big screen. For writing the screenplay for "Equus", he was nominated for the 1977 Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar but the award went to Alvin Sargent, who wrote the screenplay for Julia. For writing the screenplay for Amadeus, Shaffer received both the 1984 Best Screenplay Golden Globe and the 1984 Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar.
He received the William Inge Award for Distinguished Achievement in the American Theater in 1992. Two years later he was appointed Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Oxford University. He was named Knight Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth II in the 2001 New Years Honours.
The Salt Land (1954), his first play, which was presented on BBC television.
Balance Of Terror (1957)
The Prodigal Father (1957)
Five Finger Exercise (1958)
The Private Ear and The Public Eye (1962), from which he adapted the 1972 film Follow Me!
The Establishment (1963)
The Merry Roosters Panto (1963)
The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964) which examines the conquest of Peru by the Spanish, and was made into a 1969 film.
Black Comedy/White Lies (1967)
The Battle of Shrivings (1970)
Equus (1973), based on the real-life story of a teenage stable-boy who blinded several horses, won the 1975 Tony Award for Best Play and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and was made into a 1977 film.
Amadeus (1979) which tells a fictional story of how court composer Antonio Salieri attempted to destroy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart of whom he was jealous. It won a Tony Award for Best Play, in 1981, and was made into a 1984 film, which won eight Academy Awards including Best Picture.
