Showman Shaffer

It was a historic opening at Broadway's Plymouth Theater. No sooner had the animal cries of pain subsided, the drumming hoofs died away, than the audience leaped to its feet to give Playwright Peter Shaffer, seated in a box, a five-minute ovation. No one could recall such a spontaneous demonstration on Broadway since Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman opened in 1949. The shy Shaffer was overwhelmed. "It's never happened to me before," he said. "I cry every time I think about it."

It took Shaffer 2 1/2 years to write Equus, the dazzling psychological thriller--about a boy who blinds six horses--that is now Broadway's rarest ticket. He had heard in 1972 about the incident on which the play is based. A stableboy had been brought before the magistrates in a rural part of England, accused of blinding with a poker the 26 horses he cared for. The story haunted Shaffer. He never tried to find out the actual details because "I'm not a journalist or a photographer." He is, however, a consummate technician. He delved into the history of horses as sexual and religious symbols and read extensively in animal and child psychology. Then he worked out the boy's motivations to his own satisfaction. In the play they are revealed in long, troubled dialogues between the boy (Peter Firth), who actually worships horses, and a psychiatrist (Anthony Hopkins).

Queasy Subjects. Equus' triumph on Broadway is more than a personal one for Shaffer. It is also a tribute to the vitality of British theater. Once again this year Broadway has imported much of its excitement from London. Apart from Equus, the two most highly praised new plays are Alan Ayckbourn's farce Absurd Person Singular and Peter Nichols' black comedy The National Health. And next week the Royal Shakespeare Company's Sherlock Holmes will arrive from Washington, B.C., where it has played to record audiences.

In many ways, Peter Shaffer's meticulously crafted play helps to explain why London, not New York, remains the greater hub of theatrical activity. Shaffer is writing for an avid theatergoing public. "The English have a reverence for theater," he says. "They all want to be actors." Shaffer knows that audience viscerally. In this respect he resembles Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan, both of whom managed to write hits about such then queasy subjects as drug addiction (The Vortex) and homosexuality (Ross). Like them, Shaffer possesses an apparently flawless intuition about how much he can shock the audience without turning it off. Coming from a nation that reveres horses, he shrewdly placed a completely nude love scene--which might otherwise have caused a fuss--just before the boy's outrage on the horses. He also has an ear tuned to his audience's particular anxieties. He speaks of the modern struggle to live with ambiguities: the knowledge that any good course can be immediately opposed by another equally possible one. It is this constant weighing of trade-offs that forms Shaffer's conflicts. In Equus, the psychiatrist can cure the boy; he can exorcise his gods-demons, but he knows that in exchange he can offer only the dubious promise of "normality" and "adjustment."

In the execution of Equus there are no ambiguities. Together with Director John Dexter and Set Designer John Napier, Shaffer has fashioned a spectacle dominated by horses: actors who bear on their heads equine masks and on their feet wear 6-in.-high hoofs that thud with the menace of a jungle drum. Shaffer has been fascinated by mask drama ever since he wrote The Royal Hunt of the Sun, about the conquistador Pizarro in Peru. At his suggestion, Inca funeral masks were worn by the Indians in the last act. "Nobody could think how they should look during Pizarro's speech over the corpse of Atahuallpa," explained Shaffer. "I thought of the masks."

The results were rewarding. People asked Shaffer how he got the masks to change their expressions. "They hadn't, of course," said Shaffer. "But the audience invested so much emotion in the play that it looked as if they had." Many of the audience at Equus react similarly: they claim they see the horses' eyes roll. That to Shaffer is the fulfillment of his job. "The playwright must exercise the audience's muscle, its imagination."

Shaffer took time deciding to make the theater his career. Born in 1926, he and his twin Anthony (who wrote Sleuth) grew up in Liverpool. Their father, an Orthodox Jew, was a successful real estate broker. In 1944, both sons were conscripted to work in the mines. Under the Bevin plan, depleted mines were beefed up by youngsters chosen by ballot. "It was wicked work," recalls Shaffer. Later he went to Cambridge, where he toyed with the idea of writing, and then he and Anthony teamed up to turn out three detective novels, long since out of print. Peter drifted to New York for a while but returned to England. "I couldn't write in New York. I had to get back to my roots." He feels strongly that "all art is national."

Back home, his first stage play was a resounding success in 1958. Five Finger Exercise was a taut rearrangement of that staple of British drama, the middle-class family turned into a pack of cannibals. His next work, the hit comedy double bill The Private Ear and The Public Eye, did not appear until 1962. He is a slow, easily distracted writer. It took him six years to finish The Royal Hunt of the Sun.

No Rivalry. There has been only one Shaffer flop to date, The Battle of Shrivings, about the pitting of a peace movement leader, rather like Bertrand Russell, against an errant disciple. Ironically it opened within weeks of his brother Anthony's hit Sleuth in 1970. Peter says there is no fraternal rivalry; he suggested that Anthony, who was making films for TV, try writing again.

At 48, Shaffer is unmarried and divides his time between apartments in London and New York. Full of extravagant praise for the Equus actors, he has cast himself in loco parentis to 21-year-old Peter Firth, whom he put up briefly while Firth looked for his own place. "It is his first stage job," explains Shaffer, emphasizing the emotional and physical demands of the role on a novice. And new ideas for plays buzz in Shaffer's head; the draft of a light comedy, The Syllabub Saloon, awaits revision. But right now he is intent on enjoying the high of Equus' rapturous reception--one area in which he admits Americans are clearly superior to his compatriots. "I can never get over the hyper-feverish pace of Broadway," he said. "In England, it's either 'Well done,' or 'Bad luck, try again.' Quite a different language, you see. I've been learning American for 20 years. Why, I think I could even work here now."

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