Peter Shaffer
1926–2016 · British playwright and screenwriter
Peter Shaffer (Liverpool, 1926 - Curraheen, Ireland, 2016) was a British playwright and screenwriter writing in English. He is remembered for mid-twentieth-century theatre that joined psychological probing with bold stagecraft. His work found success in London and on Broadway, and several of his plays were later filmed.
Born into a Jewish family, he grew up in London and won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read history. During the Second World War he worked as a coal miner under the Bevin Boys scheme, and he held a range of jobs before writing became his full-time occupation.
His first play for television, The Salt Land, appeared in 1955. Five Finger Exercise (1958) brought him wider recognition, first in London and then in New York. Much of his later work was written for the National Theatre, founded in 1963. He moved between philosophical drama and satirical comedy. The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964) dramatises the Spanish conquest of Peru, while Black Comedy (1965) builds its humour on a pitch-black room that is, for the audience, brightly lit.
Equus (1973) won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1975. Amadeus (1979), about the rivalry between Mozart and Salieri, won the same award in 1981 and became his best-known work. Shaffer adapted both plays for the cinema, and he won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for the Amadeus screenplay.
His legacy lies in bringing questions of mind, faith and envy to the stage with careful craft. He died in Ireland in 2016, shortly after his ninetieth birthday.
Key works
- Five Finger Exercise (1958): a comedy about the tensions within an English middle-class family, which established his reputation.
- The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964): an epic tragedy on the conquest of Peru and the killing of the Inca ruler Atahualpa by Pizarro.
- Equus (1973): a psychological drama in which a psychiatrist tries to understand a boy who blinded several horses.
- Amadeus (1979): a play about Mozart and the court composer Salieri, driven by jealousy and rivalry.
- Black Comedy (1965): a comedy in which characters fumble around a room that is dark for them but brightly lit for the audience.
Works in Filopedia
- Black Comedy 1965
Curiosities
Playwright twins
Shaffer was the identical twin of fellow playwright Anthony Shaffer, and the two wrote three detective novels together under the pseudonym Peter Antony.
Wartime miner
During the Second World War he worked in the coal mines as a Bevin Boy, a scheme that directed young men into mining instead of military service.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.