The Times, December 5, 1985, by Irving Wardle
"Spy of History"
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Yonadab, nephew of King David, gets two brief mentions in 
the Book of Samuel: first in planning the rape of David's 
daughter tamar by her brother Amnon; then hastening back 
from Baalhazor to reassure the King that all his sons, 
except Amnon have survived the feast of vengeance.

So far as Yonadab is concerned, the positive cancels out the 
negative; and all Samuel adds to the blank portrait is to 
call him "a very subtle man." Taking this cryptic piece of 
evidence, together with Dan Jacobson's novel *The Rape of 
Tamar*, Peter Shaffer has set out to supply Yonadab with a 
motive and a human face which could have given rise to the 
bare Old Testament inscription.

Even in Samuel's version, Yonadab has a family likeness to 
other Shaffer characters: small men on the sidelines, 
watching spectacles of ecstasy, genius and power, which 
facinate them and which lie utterly behond their own scope. 
The theatrical advantage of such men is that they share our 
common mediocrity and thus can mediate between the events 
and the spectator, unbounded by place and time. Yonadab, 
like Salieri, is a spy of history; able to speak directly to 
us because he is of small account in David's court and--
crucially--because he is no believer in Jehovah.

The play is sub-titled "The Watcher." Yonadab is a self-
proclaimed voyeur: an ignoble role, which he duly enacts by 
stealing back to observe the rape of Tamar.But, given the 
brutalities of his tribe, the watcher can claim some 
superiority over the participants.

Also, like Salieri and the Doctor is *Equus*, Yonadab has a 
vision of what life ought to be: and he looks to David's 
sons to bring it into existence. "Princes make dreams 
happen," he says, echoing Musset's *Loranzaccio*, "or what 
is their use." He dreams of a milllenium of gentleness and 
love, and looks to the surviving alternative faiths to bring 
it about. In particular, he is haunted by the Egyptian and 
Phoenician myths of incestious divinity; and when Amnon 
confesses his passion for Tamar, Yonadab assists him for his 
own reasons.

The play takes its shape from a birth and death of faith. 
Yonadab hatches his plot with Amnon in a spirit of cynical 
experiment, and it ends with the disastrous sexual nausea 
described by Samuel. But when Tamar seeks refuge with 
David's beloved Absalom, and tenderness develops between 
them, it seems that incest may now be leading to divinity. 
Yonadab's skepticism gives way to awe: "I had invented most 
of this myself," he says, "and now stood weeping before the 
hope of it."

No sooner is it born, however, than the dream goes up in 
smoke, with Tamar's emergence as a rabbinically ferocious 
leader in her own right, and the death of Absalom on the 
tree.

This plot takes Shaffer far beyond filling in Biblical gaps; 
and, in particular, the death of Absalom goes for very 
little as it is presented without preparation and with no 
reference to his attempt to seize power. But the real 
objection to the play, is that is lays claim to ultimate 
questions of man's place in the universe and reduces them 
simply to theatrical structure. There is a heavyweight plot, 
filled with anguished argument, but its success is only in 
holding your attention as a spectator rather than awakening 
you to the mysterious and possibilities of human destiny.

Peter Hall's production takes its cue from the idea of 
spying. Design, by John Bury, consists of a series of 
curtained off sections on a right-angle platform, suggesting 
the endless recesses of a labyrinthine Jerusalem, the 
tabernacle, and a curtain of time separating Davidic society 
from the spy confiding to us from the edge of the stage. 
Alan Bates's Yonadab, eyes zipping craftily from side to 
side, staccato delivery terminating in twisted grimaces, is 
not without echoes of Tony Hancock in his early 
anachronistic court appearances. The success of the 
performance is the power of hope and despair to which it 
builds in despite of the strained over-writing of the later 
scenes.

His transformation is matched by long-range development 
elsewhere in the cast; notably the decline of Leigh Lawon's 
Amnon into a blubbering wreck, appealing to him as "Yonnie," 
and Wendy Morgan's Tamar, a spoilt child changing to a 
warrior queen. David, the great manipulator, stimulates 
Patrick Stewart to a rhapsodic performance in which 
political craft is indistinguishable from intense paternal 
love; which, in the case of Anthony Head's seraphic Absalom, 
is easy to credit. The court rituals, and the slaying of 
Amnon, are spectacles of the utmost virtuosity.



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