Newsweek, January 13, 1986, by Jack Kroll
"Four From the London Stage"
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[...] Remarkable in another way is Alan Bates in the title 
role of *Yonadab*, Peter Shaffer's controversial new play. 
Once again the author of "*Amadeus* explores the battle 
between the mundane and the transcendent. In *Amadeus*, the 
mediocre Salieri hated and envied the genius of Mozart. 
Yonadab is a Biblical Salieri, a cynical hanger-on at the 
court of King David who eggs on David's son Amnon to the 
incestuous rape of his half-sister, Tamar. Yonadab does this 
out of salacious mischief, but also out of his desperate 
desire to believe that the great ones of the world can 
transform the basest act into some kind of divinity.

For me this is Shaffer's most daring, most personal, most 
honest play. He makes Yonadab part Old Testament toady, part 
20th-century wise guy who speaks directly to the audience as 
their "special correspondent" who will bring them the 
vicarious delights of voyeurism. Hiding to watch the rape 
and appalled when it becomes just another fornication, at 
times wallowing in his mediocrity, at times wrenching loose 
from it in a burst of tormented eloquence, Bates's Yonadab 
is Shaffer's most human, most scathingly funny spokesman. 
Called "Yonnie" by Amnon, he seems like the master of 
ceremonies to history, presenting it with grim relish as an 
absurd, obscene spectacle of self-gratification. Heeeere's 
Yonnie!

Shaffer and director Peter Hall create a kind of seductive 
daydream of King David's court, with masked spearmen, 
snarling horns, pounding drums. Notable in a superb cast are 
Patrick Stewart's slick, sly David, Leigh Lawson's horny, 
hypocritical Amnon, Anthony Head as his self-adoring 
brother, Absalom, and Wendy Morgan in the atrociously 
difficult role of Tamar, who must ricochet from trusting 
virgin to reluctant voluptuary to outraged victim to 
murderous virago, the first and most fearsomely angry 
feminist in history.



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