New Statesman, December 13, 1985, by Benedict Nightingale
-----------------------------------------------------------

It has been quite a struggle trying to take Peter Shaffer as 
seriously as he's always seemed to take himself; but, at 
*Yonadab*, I began at least to find myself able to do so. 
The play is, to be sure, never very impressive and at 
moments positively maddening. Isn't it time Shaffer got over 
his weakness for florid, gasping rhetoric, the sort of 
overblown quasi-poetry that has people "impaled on the 
inextricable point of pointlessness" or talks of sex in 
terms of "the hunter in the tangled forest where all paths 
lead to the same blank clearing"? Yet isn't there something, 
well, plucky about him too? In a world of mainly thin plays 
on mainly monochrome subjects, isn't there a cranky heroism 
in the way he leaps across the centuries feverishly banging 
away at grand metaphysical themes that have foxed finer 
minds than his?

Yonadab occurs some 2,500 years before *The Royal Hunt of 
the Sun*, 2,700 before *Amadeus* and 2,900-odd before 
*Equus*, yet brings together ideas and obsessions to be 
found in all three. There's the envious outsider, the man 
who feels himself emotionally and spiritually deprived, 
yearning to acquire the capacities, gifts and strengths he 
believes another unjustly to have been given. There's the 
reaching for an ecstasy which invariably turns out to be 
impure, imperfect, flawed or failed in some way. There's the 
outrage at a universe that's perverse or empty or perversely 
empty; a paradoxical mix of atheism and wishfulness rather 
similar to that expressed by Beckett's Hamm, for whom God 
was "that bastard--he doesn't even exist." There's the hope, 
invariably disappointed, that somehow human beings will so 
harness the twin powers of love and creativity as themselves 
to become gods on earth.

More specifically, we're presented with Yonadab, unregarded 
hanger-on in King David's court and "voyeur extraordinary." 
When the monarch's son Amnon abjectly falls for his half-
sister Tamar, this character encourages him to rape her, for 
reasons that aren't altogether malicious or smutty. At some 
strange, superstitious level of himself, Yonadab semi-demi-
believes his own argument, that incest will magically 
transform the couple into a Jewish equivalent of Osiris and 
Isis, or Zeus and Hera, or some other dual divinity. But no 
such thing happens, either then or later., when Absalom is 
similarly inveigled into seeing sex with his sister as a 
short-cut to rapturous omnipotence. Celestial love turns out 
to be "just another fuck," the would-be men-gods are exposed 
as credulous clods; Jehovah is revealed as a sort of 
malevolent void; Yonadab is left feeling more peripheral, 
doubting and derelict than ever; and only Tamar seems to 
gain. In her indignation at the male world which has abused 
her, she finds the cunning to get her revenge and the 
courage to become an Old Testament sibyl, much visited by 
wronged wives and feared by their husbands.

Shaffer's tale and Peter Hall's production have their 
moments all right. Whenever Leigh Lawson's Amnon is onstage, 
whether he's lugubriously coveting Wendy Morgan's Tamar or 
stolidly stalking her or morosely mourning her sexual 
insufficiency, the action comes to something that might 
without exaggeration be called life. So it does at the 
murder of this woebegone clown-Caliban, which happens very 
inventively and bloodily inside the diaphanous curtains that 
cleverly switch from evoking tents or bedchambers to being 
the grim, solid walls of grim, solid places. So it does when 
Patrick Stewart's peppy David is charismatically holding 
court or Anthony Head's Absalom, "the incandescent prig," is 
displaying his insufferable conceit, or Ms Morgan's Tamar is 
slyly beginning to manipulate events her way.

But Shaffer isn't content to let his action take its own 
course and suggest its own meaning. He doesn't trust it 
adequately to cope with his obsessions, still less draw 
conclusions from them. At any rate, he's all too evidently 
omnipresent himself, commenting and arguing and interpreting 
and adjudicating in a style that's sometimes nudging and 
coloquial, sometimes sententious and sermonising, but either 
way leaves us in the audience scant space to indulge what 
little capacity for intellectual speculation we ourselves 
might possess. What's worse, his chosen mouthpiece or 
megaphone is a single character, one who dominates the 
evening without being very plausible or interesting in 
himself: Yonadab.

The psychiatrist Dysart in *Equus* and the composer Salieri 
in *Amadeus* were both expected to narrate their respective 
stories and bring out those stories' significance; but each 
of them could also claim some consistency of character, and 
the latter a certain sombre fascination as well. That's not 
the case with Yonadab, who seems a Biblical Iago or 
Mephistopheles, an anachronistic version of the archetypal 
man-in-the-dirty-mac, a humanist idealist and searcher-
after-truth, and a sardonically alienated rebel, depending 
on how Shaffer is feeling and what his plot is wanting. It 
could, I suppose, all add up to an intriguingly intricate 
character; and its failure to do so could, I suppose partly 
be blamed on the actor playing him. Alan Bates's built-in 
sneer can become splendidly eloquent, indeed rise to a sort 
of superciliousness in excelsis, but scarcely convinces us 
we're in the presence of someone who cares very much about 
metaphysical ultimates.

Yet that excuse won't quite do, because the root problem is 
surely the writing. The sincerity and seriousness of 
Shaffer's philosophic anguishings aren't in doubt, and his 
instinctive theatricality has been demonstrated in play 
after play. The trouble here, the reason one sometimes gets 
the impression of being earnestly buttonholed by a man on a 
soapbox in the middle of a grand opera without music, is 
that those two elements fail to coalesce; and the case of 
Yonadab is more contradictory still.

He's now a Shaffer surrogate passing himself off as an 
objective creation, now a dramatic device posing as a 
person, but either way he has to carry the play. It is too 
large, curious and unwieldy a burden for so fragile, feeble 
and lazily conceived a support. 



-----------------------------------------------------------
                     Bentley's Bedlam
            http://www.BetsyDa.com/bedlam.html

This website is for information and entertainment purposes only 
and is not intended to infringe on copyrights held by others.