The Sunday Times, December 8, 1985, by John Peter
"The art of the voyeur"
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The National Theatre has got the pantomime season off to an 
early start with Peter Shaffer's new play *Yonadab* 
(Olivier); a long, louche literary entertainment which 
relates to serious drama rather as Little Red Riding Hood 
relates to anthropology. You can, if you're so inclined, 
read into it a parable on vicarious experience, or the 
terrors of heterosexual lust; but really, it's only about a 
man who gets a grim kick out of watching his cousin having 
it off with his sister.

Like all Shaffer's plays, *Yonadab" is theatrical without 
being dramatic. By this I mean that it is inspired by a 
sensational situation which is then unfolded later by later 
like Ibsen's onion, and, like the same vegetable, is found 
to have no real centre. What is missing is the sense of 
progress and discovery, which is the essence of drama. The 
fact that there is a story with a beginning and an end is 
secondary to the purely theatrical thrill of watching the 
situation. The situation is the message: theatre as 
voyeurism.

Shaffer acknowledges in the programme that his play was 
inspired by Dan Jacobson's brilliant novel, "The Rape of 
Tamar" (1970).This turns out to be an honourable but unwise 
move, since it forces one to compare the book with the play. 
Both are rooted in the Old Testament (2 Samuel 13) and the 
story of King David's son Amnon raping his sister Tamar; and 
Shaffer's elaboration of the laconic Biblical narrative is 
very close to Jacobson's. There are even direct verbal 
echoes. Most especially, both use Amnon's cousin Yonadab as 
their sardonic narrator. But Jacobson's terse, tense tale is 
an anatomy of politics, bad conscience and the sterility of 
betrayal; whereas Shaffer ends up with a slack and prurient 
literary melodrama of sexual revenge.

I use the word literary in a pejorative sense. Shaffer's art 
is the art of glossing and elaboration. His glittering 
theatrical talent becomes deeply undramatic in execution 
because his garrulous characters tell us everything about 
themselves, often rather more than there is to tell, 
depriving us of the essential excitement of real drama which 
is to search and unravel the implications of words. It is in 
this sense that such work is low-brow: it gorges us on 
spectacle, physical and verbal, but it doesn't disturb the 
mind. Theatre as reassurance.

Peter Hall's production is not so much a production as an 
arrangement. Indeed, there's little in this play for a 
director as we now understand the word. Its characters are 
not people but rather costumed, or, God help us, uncostumed 
totems. Wendy Morgan (Tamar) is the most believable of 
these: a lethal adolescent full of innocent depravity. But 
the evening really belongs to Alan Bates, who plays Yonadab 
like an old-fashioned panto demon. This is not acting so 
much as performing; three solid hours of busy body-language 
and fruity declamation, flamboyant but monotonous, expertly 
mechanical, and cold as ice.



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