Sir Peter Shaffer, in full Sir Peter Levin Shaffer, (born May 15, 1926, Liverpool, England—died June 6, 2016, Curraheen, County Cork, Ireland), British playwright of considerable range who moved easily from farce to the portrayal of human anguish.
Shaffer was educated at St. Paul’s School in London and Trinity College, Cambridge. He initially worked at the New York Public Library and for a music publisher. His first staged play, Five Finger Exercise, is a tautly constructed domestic drama that almost overnight established his reputation. It was followed by the one-act duo The Private Ear and The Public Eye. Shaffer then wrote The Royal Hunt of the Sun, a portrayal of the conflict between the Spanish and the Incas, and Black Comedy.
In the 1970s Shaffer gained public and critical acclaim for two vastly different Tony Award-winning plays: Equus (1973; film 1977), the story of a mentally disturbed stableboy’s obsession with horses, and Amadeus (1979; film 1984), about the rivalry between Mozart and his fellow composer Antonio Salieri. The film version of the latter play won eight Academy Awards, including best adapted screenplay for Shaffer. His later plays include the biblical epic Yonadab (1985), Lettice and Lovage (1987), and The Gift of the Gorgon (1992). He also cowrote novels with his twin brother, playwright Anthony Shaffer, under the pen name Peter Anthony. Shaffer was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1987 and was knighted in 2001.
Equus, a play in two acts, is set in Rokesby Psychiatric Hospital in southern England. Most of the action takes place in this hospital—specifically in psychiatrist Martin Dysart’s office. However, as characters in Dysart’s office discuss and reconstruct past events in the life of Alan Strang, the play’s central character, they play out these events as full scenes, oscillating between the past and present. The play’s form and staging is that of a Greek drama: when actors are not assuming their individual roles, they sit onstage and comprise a chorus. This allows the action of the play to unfold in fluid fashion. Scenes in Dysart’s office quickly transition into events that have been drawn from the characters’ memories.
Equus, a play in two acts by Peter Shaffer, produced and published in 1973. It depicts a psychiatrist’s fascination with a disturbed teenager’s mythopoeic obsession with horses.
The drama unfolds through the eyes of Martin Dysart, a psychiatrist and an amateur mythologist, who narrates the events of his rehabilitation of Alan Strang, a 17-year-old stable boy who has been arrested for blinding six horses. Confused by the conflict between his father’s agnosticism and voyeurism and his mother’s secretive religious devotion, Alan has grown to worship horses as deities of great religious and sexual power. When a stable girl attempts to seduce Alan, he is impotent in the presence of the horses and blinds them in a fit of uncontrolled anger and guilt. Dysart grows to appreciate the depth and power of Alan’s feelings and to regret that his successful treatment of the boy will rob him of his creative vitality.