Peter Shaffer built his reputation by putting private conflicts on a grand stage. In The Royal Hunt of the Sun, a Spanish conquistador confronts an Inca ruler; in Equus, a psychiatrist tries to understand a teenager’s fixation on horses; in Amadeus, Antonio Salieri confronts Mozart’s apparent genius. These plays brought history, belief, desire and jealousy into sharply defined dramatic conflicts. Two of them went on to win the Tony Award for Best Play, and Shaffer adapted both for the screen.

From Liverpool to the stage

Born Peter Levin Shaffer in Liverpool on 15 May 1926, he grew up in London in a Jewish family. His parents were Reka, née Fredman, and Jack Shaffer, an estate agent. Peter was the identical twin of playwright Anthony Shaffer; they also had a brother, Brian. Peter attended the Hall School in Hampstead and St Paul’s School in London, then won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied history.

During the Second World War, Shaffer worked as a Bevin Boy coal miner. He later took a range of jobs, including work as a bookshop clerk and an assistant at the New York Public Library. His early career was not confined to the stage: with Anthony, he wrote three detective novels under the shared pseudonym Peter Antony. Their titles were The Woman in the Wardrobe (1951), How Doth the Little Crocodile? (1952) and Withered Murder (1955).

Shaffer’s first play, The Salt Land, was broadcast on ITV on 8 November 1955. His breakthrough as a playwright came with Five Finger Exercise, which opened in London in 1958 under the direction of John Gielgud. It won the Evening Standard Drama Award. When the production transferred to New York the following year, it also won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Foreign Play. Those early successes established a transatlantic audience for a writer whose plays would move between intimate rooms and historical worlds.

Drama shaped by contrast

In May 1962, the Globe Theatre presented The Private Ear and The Public Eye as a double bill. Both plays centre on three characters and aspects of love; Maggie Smith and Kenneth Williams appeared in each. Smith won the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Leading Actress. The following year, the National Theatre was established, and virtually all of Shaffer’s subsequent work was written for its service.

His plays ranged from philosophical drama to comedy. The Royal Hunt of the Sun, first staged in 1964, dramatises the Spanish conquest of Peru through the encounter between Francisco Pizarro and the Inca ruler Atahuallpa. Shaffer completed the play in 1958, before its later production brought it to audiences. The conflict is historical, but the play’s scale allows questions of power and belief to sit alongside the encounter between its two leaders.

With Black Comedy (1965), Shaffer turned to comic theatrical invention: its characters feel their way around a supposedly pitch-black room, while the stage is in fact flooded with light. The device makes the audience’s knowledge part of the joke. It also illustrates the range of his work: he could move from conquest and spiritual conflict to a tightly constructed comic situation.

Equus and Amadeus

Equus (1973) centres on Alan Strang, a seventeen-year-old stable boy who has driven a spike into the eyes of six horses, and Martin Dysart, the psychiatrist seeking to understand him. Rather than treating the case as a simple puzzle, the play sets Dysart’s professional task against a deeper question about the cost of intense belief and passion. Its staging and subject made the work provocative, while its psychological conflict gave the two central characters competing claims on the audience’s attention.

The play won the 1975 Tony Award for Best Play and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. It ran for more than 1,000 performances on Broadway. Shaffer later adapted it as a screenplay; the film was released in 1977, and his screenplay earned an Academy Award nomination. The distinction matters: Equus won the Tony for its stage life, while its screen adaptation was nominated for an Oscar.

In Amadeus (1979), Shaffer revisited the struggle between admiration and resentment through Salieri’s account of Mozart. The court composer hears what he regards as divine musical inspiration in the work of a rival he finds personally offensive, and jealousy becomes the engine of the drama. The play won the Evening Standard Drama Award and the Theatre Critics’ Award in London. On Broadway, it won the 1981 Tony Award for Best Play and ran for more than 1,000 performances.

Shaffer adapted Amadeus for Miloš Forman’s 1984 film. The film won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture; Shaffer won the Academy Award and Golden Globe for his screenplay. He had also been nominated for an Academy Award for adapting Equus, and received nominations for two BAFTA Awards. The move from stage to screen was therefore not incidental to his career: he wrote the adaptations himself and secured major recognition in both forms.

Comedy, later plays and honours

Shaffer continued to write for the stage after Amadeus. He created Lettice and Lovage specifically for Maggie Smith in 1986. The play brought her a Tony Award for Best Actress in 1990, after three nominations, and Margaret Tyzack won for Best Featured Actress. Shaffer’s play was nominated for Best Play, and its direction was also nominated. Other works included Shrivings, Yonadab and The Gift of the Gorgon, extending a body of work that included both philosophical drama and satire.

His honours recognised achievements in theatre, film and public life. Shaffer was appointed CBE in 1987 and knighted in 2001. The Alfred Toepfer Foundation awarded him its Shakespeare Prize in 1989, and the University of Bath gave him an honorary Doctor of Letters in 1993. His stage plays also received repeated recognition: alongside the Tony wins for Equus and Amadeus, Black Comedy and Lettice and Lovage received Tony nominations.

Shaffer died on 6 June 2016, aged 90, at a hospice facility in Curraheen, County Cork, while visiting Ireland shortly after his birthday. He lived in Manhattan from the 1970s onwards. His later partner, voice teacher Robert Leonard, had died in 1990; the two are buried together in the east side of Highgate Cemetery. A Broadway memorial tribute was held for Shaffer in 2017.

Why Peter Shaffer deserves a place in British Legacy

Peter Shaffer’s place in British cultural history rests on more than the international success of Equus and Amadeus. His breakthrough came in London: Five Finger Exercise won an Evening Standard Drama Award before its New York production won a further critics’ prize. The National Theatre became the setting for virtually all his later work, and plays such as The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Black Comedy show the breadth of a career that moved between historical conflict, philosophical drama and comedy. These achievements connect his international reach to a sustained contribution to British theatre.

His work also travelled between forms without losing its dramatic force. Shaffer adapted Equus and Amadeus for the screen, earning an Oscar nomination for the first and an Oscar and Golden Globe for the second. The plays’ separate Tony Awards for Best Play show that their success was not confined to film, while the screen honours demonstrate how effectively their conflicts could be reshaped for cinema. His career offers a specific example of British playwriting reaching Broadway and Hollywood through the writer’s own adaptations. That combination of stage craft, screenwriting and recognition on both sides of the Atlantic makes Shaffer a substantial part of Britain’s theatrical legacy.

Sources

Peter Shaffer — Wikipedia revision

Adapted in part from Peter Shaffer by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.