New York Times, December 22, 1985, by Benedict Nightingale "Peter Shaffer Creates Another Envious Outsider" ----------------------------------------------------------- Whatever else Peter Shaffer may lack, it isn't courage, it isn't derring-do. His plays traverse the centuries and the globe, raising questions that have perplexed minds from Job to Samuel Beckett. Two civilizations, two theologies, Christian and Inca, confront each other against a backdrop of the Andes in *The Royal Hunt of the Sun.* The composer Salieri challenges God to a bout of metaphysical fisticuffs in the more recent *Amadeus,* incidentally destroying Mozart in the process. And now there's *Yonadab*, transporting us simultaneously to 1000 B.C., Israel, King David's court and (perhaps the most exotic location of all) the hyped-up debating chamber the play's author caries in his head. Several times in the past, one has felt that Peter Shaffer deserves a special medal for a sort of majestic recklessness in the field; and that's also the case this month, at the National Theater. According to the Book of Samuel, Yonadab was a "very subtle man." As elaborated by Shaffer, and played by Alan Bates from behind a bright blue beard, he's stranger and more sinister than that. Not only does he incite David's son Amnon to rape his half-sister Tamar, as in the Bible; he does his best to organize her seduction by her brother Absalom, to whom she's fled for protection; and his motives in all this are decidedly peculiar, a mix of malice, sexual pervesity and something altogether more highfalutin. Beneath the cynic and wily manipulator, one can clearly see a spiritual buccaneer, a philosophical desperado, obsessively embattled with a God he intellectually rejects. Yonadab even admits to half-believing the arguments he puts to both Amnon and Absalom, that incest will rapturously transform them and Tamar into Jewish counterparts of the Egyptian Osiris and Isis: new, gentler versions of the kind of sibling deities whom Jehovah has grimly supplanted. It sounds silly. It is silly, because no such thing can or does happen. But it allows Shaffer to deal more exhaustively than ever before with the situations and ideas that have preoccupied him throughout his writing career. Emotionally, Yonadab is kin to Salieri, to the psychiatrist Dysart in *Equus*, to the conquistador Pizarro in *Royal Hunt*. He's the envious outsider, watching and seeking to control others he feels to be in some way more gifted, more blessed, more central to the workings of an unust universe. He seeks faith, and can't find it. He yearns for ecstasy, and can't achieve that, even vicariously. His ultimate vision, so it seems, is of a world in which man can abandon his helpless metaphysical gropings because he's discovered and fulfilled what's divine in himself; but at the play's end that humanist utopia looks pretty remote too. The problem is bringing all this plausibly to life, something Shaffer doesn't always manage to do. Peter Hall's production in the Olivier auditorium certainly has its moments. All is well when Leigh Lawson's Amnon, a woebegone blend of Caliban and clown, is lugubriously stalking his sexual prey, or Anthony Head's trim, lithe Absalom is displaying his insufferable conceit. David's court--white curtains, a wicker throne, retainers and relatives squatting or prostrate--is evoked without the pompous ado one associates with biblical sagas, and the staging is commendably spare and simple throughout. The murder of Amnon, a bull tormented then speared by Absalom's tame matadors, is dazzlingly done. But Wendy Morgan is hard put to engineer the play's principal twist, in which Tamar, David's spoiled pet, turns out surreptitiously to have become an archetype of baleful feminism and slyly to have arranged both her brothers' ruin. One feels it's her author, not she, who is manipulating the plot. In fact, Shaffer's hand and mind are often more visible than they might be. To an even smaller extent than usual is he content to let his tale take its own course and suggest its own significance. To an even greater extent than usual his protagonist is also his narrator, and his narrator is also an excuse for Shaffer himself to intrude, interpret, speculate, must, argue, conclude. Certainly, Salieri brought more substance and consistency of character to those functions than Yonadab, who seems to shift and change according to the whim of his author and the demands of the story. One moment he's Iago, or maybe Mephistopheles; another, a seedy voyeur en route to some porn parlor in the Times Square area of Old Jerusalem; another, an alienated antihero sardonically stepped out of a midcentury French novel; yet another, an earnest sage and Shaffer-surrogate, soulfully examining the dark for some glimmer of truth and meaning. It doesn't add up to a solid enough support for the big, unwieldy play the character is asked to carry. Alan Bates' performance doesn't vastly help, either. Any actor would find it hard to reconcile Yonadab's contradictions, or at least make them credibly incongruous. Even the style of his confidences to the audience varies disconcertingly, from the nudging, smirking and colloquial, to the headily and sometimes sententiously poetical. But this serves only to emphasize that more is needed than the blend of fastidiousness and mockery, wincing and sneering, which Bates brings to the role. He does, it's true, sometimes lift ordinary disdain to a kind of soaring superciliousness, impressive in its way; but he misses the desperate fanaticism of the character's celestial questionings. And since Shaffer would seem to have written the play mainly to express that fever and that anguish, it's a serious lapse, elaborately constructing a torch or firebrand and then neglecting to light it. ----------------------------------------------------------- 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.