Peter Shaffer

Sir Peter Levin Shaffer was an English playwright, screenwriter, and novelist whose career stretched across the second half of the twentieth century and into the early years of the twenty-first. Born in Liverpool on 15 May 1926 to a Jewish family, he grew up in London with his brothers, Anthony and Brian. Anthony, his identical twin, also became a playwright. Shaffer was educated at the Hall School in Hampstead and St Paul’s School, London, then won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied history.

Before he found his way fully into drama, Shaffer lived through work far from the theatre. During World War II he served as a Bevin Boy coal miner, and afterward took jobs including bookstore clerk and assistant at the New York Public Library. Those varied settings sit behind a writer whose plays often mixed intellectual argument, emotional pressure, and theatrical surprise. His first play, The Salt Land, was presented on ITV in 1955. In 1958 he established his reputation with Five Finger Exercise, directed in London by John Gielgud. It won the Evening Standard Drama Award, and when it moved to New York in 1959 it won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Foreign Play.

Shaffer became closely associated with the stage at a time when British theatre was expanding its public presence. The National Theatre was established in 1963, and virtually all of his later work was done in its service. His writing ranged from philosophical dramas to satirical comedies. The Private Ear and The Public Eye, presented in 1962, were small-cast plays about aspects of love. The Royal Hunt of the Sun dramatized the conquest and killing of the Inca ruler Atahuallpa by Francisco Pizarro. Black Comedy used a bright stage to represent characters stumbling through darkness.

He is best known for Equus and Amadeus, both Tony Award winners for Best Play. Equus, first staged in 1973, centers on a seventeen-year-old stableboy who has blinded six horses, and it ran for more than 1,000 performances on Broadway. Shaffer adapted it for film in 1977 and received an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay. Amadeus, first produced in 1979, tells of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the jealous court composer Antonio Salieri. Its Broadway production won the 1981 Tony Award for Best Play, and Shaffer’s 1984 screen adaptation won him both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award. The film won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

Shaffer’s later work included Lettice and Lovage, written specifically for Dame Maggie Smith, as well as Yonadab and The Gift of the Gorgon. He also co-wrote three detective novels with Anthony Shaffer under the name Peter Antony. In his personal life, Shaffer was gay; he lived in Manhattan from the 1970s onward, and his partners included Paul Giovanni, Robert Leonard, and Kevin Shancady. He died on 6 June 2016 in Curraheen, County Cork, shortly after his 90th birthday. For readers of his words, one line catches the urgency that often surrounds his characters: “The trouble is if you don't spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.”