Peter Shaffer’s plays put private obsessions on a public stage. In Equus, a psychiatrist confronts a young man’s violent devotion to horses; in Amadeus, the court composer Antonio Salieri measures himself against Mozart. Shaffer made the conflicts theatrical and immediate, while leaving audiences to grapple with questions of faith, desire and the cost of ordinary life. His career, rooted in London theatre, reached Broadway and the cinema without losing its appetite for ideas.
A Liverpool childhood and a route to the stage
Born Peter Levin Shaffer in Liverpool on 15 May 1926, he was the identical twin of fellow playwright Anthony Shaffer. Their parents were Reka (née Fredman) and Jack Shaffer, an estate agent; they also had a brother, Brian. The family moved to London, where Peter attended the Hall School in Hampstead and St Paul’s School. A scholarship took him to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study history.
During the Second World War, Shaffer worked as a Bevin Boy, one of the young men directed into coal mining to support the war effort. After Cambridge, he held a succession of jobs, including as a bookshop clerk and an assistant at the New York Public Library. Writing with Anthony, he also published three detective novels under the shared pseudonym Peter Antony: The Woman in the Wardrobe (1951), How Doth the Little Crocodile? (1952) and Withered Murder (1955).
His first play, The Salt Land, was broadcast on ITV in 1955. The success encouraged him to pursue theatre, and Five Finger Exercise established his reputation when it opened in London in 1958 under the direction of John Gielgud. It won the Evening Standard Drama Award. Its New York production the following year brought a further distinction, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Foreign Play.
In 1962, Shaffer’s double bill The Private Ear and The Public Eye opened at the Globe Theatre. Both plays starred Maggie Smith and Kenneth Williams; Smith won the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Leading Actress. Shaffer’s writing soon ranged across sharply different forms, from philosophical drama to comedy.
History, comedy and a distinctive theatrical world
The Royal Hunt of the Sun, first produced in 1964, dramatises the Spanish conquest of Peru through the encounter between Francisco Pizarro and the Inca ruler Atahualpa. Shaffer had completed the work by 1958. The play brings conquest, loyalty and power into collision, turning a historical episode into a drama of competing beliefs and unequal authority.
In Black Comedy (1965), he used a theatrical reversal for comic effect: characters grope their way through what they believe is a dark room, while the stage is lit for the audience. The play was nominated for the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play. His body of work thus encompassed both large-scale historical subjects and tightly controlled comic situations.
Shaffer’s plays became closely associated with the National Theatre after it was established in 1963; virtually all of his subsequent work was produced in its service. In 1986, he wrote Lettice and Lovage specifically for Maggie Smith. The play brought further Tony nominations, and Smith later won the award for Best Actress in a Play in 1990, after three nominations. Margaret Tyzack won for Best Featured Actress in the same production.
Equus and Amadeus: private turmoil on a public stage
Equus opened in 1973 and centres on Alan Strang, a seventeen-year-old stable boy who has driven a spike into the eyes of six horses. Psychiatrist Martin Dysart tries to understand the boy’s actions and, in doing so, is forced to confront the limits of his own assumptions about normality, passion and belief. The play earned Shaffer 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 adapted Equus for film in 1977. The screenplay earned an Academy Award nomination, though the award went to Alvin Sargent for Julia. The play returned to London in 2007 in a staging directed by Thea Sharrock, and to Broadway the following year. Daniel Radcliffe played Alan in the Broadway production, which ran until February 2009. Its requirement that Radcliffe appear naked attracted mild controversy because of his association with the Harry Potter films.
Amadeus, first staged in 1979, sets Salieri’s jealousy against the music and apparent ease of Mozart, whom the court composer experiences as a rival touched by genius. The play won London theatre awards, including the Evening Standard Drama Award and the Theatre Critics’ Award. On Broadway it won the 1981 Tony Award for Best Play and ran for more than 1,000 performances.
Shaffer also wrote the screenplay for Milos Forman’s 1984 film adaptation. The film won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture; Shaffer won for adapted screenplay and received a Golden Globe for the screenplay. His two major plays therefore gained lives beyond their original productions: as screen works, they brought his dramatic conflicts to audiences far beyond the theatre.
Honours, later life and remembrance
Shaffer received further recognition for his work in theatre and film. His honours included nominations for two BAFTA Awards and a Laurence Olivier Award, as well as the Hamburg-based Alfred Toepfer Foundation’s Shakespeare Prize in 1989. The University of Bath awarded him an honorary Doctor of Letters in 1993. He was appointed CBE in 1987 and made a Knight Bachelor in the 2001 New Year’s Honours.
Shaffer lived in Manhattan from the 1970s. His partner Robert Leonard, a New York-based voice teacher, died in 1990. Shaffer died on 6 June 2016, aged 90, while on a trip to Ireland shortly after his birthday. He died at a hospice facility in Curraheen, County Cork, and was buried with Leonard in the east side of Highgate Cemetery. Broadway held a memorial tribute to him in 2017.
Why Peter Shaffer deserves a place in British Legacy
Peter Shaffer belongs in British Legacy because his work shows how a playwright can make a theatre audience think through character, conflict and form rather than through explanation alone. Five Finger Exercise first established his reputation in London, and its success travelled to New York. His later plays, including The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Equus and Amadeus, moved between intimate psychological confrontations and larger questions about conquest, belief and artistic achievement. The settings and subjects differed, but each play gave audiences a vivid dramatic encounter through which to consider those questions.
His influence is also visible in the routes his work took. Equus and Amadeus won Tony Awards for Best Play, ran for more than a thousand Broadway performances apiece and were adapted for the screen by Shaffer himself. His Amadeus screenplay won an Academy Award, taking a story first staged in London to cinema audiences around the world. The honours do not, by themselves, explain his legacy; what matters is the sustained connection between British theatre, international stages and film. Shaffer’s career demonstrates how ambitious drama can travel while retaining its power to unsettle and engage.
Sources
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.
