Peter Shaffer

Speaker 40:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's Archive. For rights' reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen seventy nine, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:31

Our castaway this week is the playwright Peter Schaffer.

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I know that music counts for a lot in your life.

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Do you play an instrument? I play the piano for myself, and I enjoy playing it. I play it every day, but I would stop it immediately if anybody came in.

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I'm sure you're too modest. What's the first record you've chosen out of this miserable allowance of eight? Um my first record would be some music by Handel.

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THE ODE FOR THE BITH DAY OF QUEEN ANN

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For me this represents one of the

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glories of Baroque music, of which I'm especially fond.

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It's both grand and intensely moving to me.

Speaker 31:56

Bye.

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The opening of Handel's Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne, the counter turner James Bowman.

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You're from the north west of the country, aren't you? Yes, I am. I was born in Liverpool, and I was there for the first nine years of my life, and then we came south. You're a twin? Yes.

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And you went to St. Paul's School when you came south. Was your brother with you? Yes. I'm actually I've got three brothers. I've got my twin and um another brother who is now at Cambridge, who's called Brian. My twin is called Tony. When did you start your fascination by the theatre? I think very, very early. As early at least, I think, as ten or eleven.

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I certainly remember at twelve going alone to the Golders Green Hippodrome and seeing John Gilgard playing Richard the Second, and being totally intoxicated by the experience. My first memory of a play was actually a play written by Michael Redgrave for children. Yes. It was all took place in a lighthouse, as far as I remember, or at least most of it did. The children had been kidnapped and put in a lighthouse, and there was a terrible ape called Pongo, and I thought it was all lovely. But my first serious encounter was the one with John Gilgard. What happened to you when you left St Paul's? I became a Bevin boy. That is to say, I was sent down the coal mines as part of my national service. And I was there for two and three quarter years. Whereabouts? First of all, in Yorkshire.

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And then in Kent. Did you work underground? I worked at first underground, but not very long. I my eyes are very bad, and uh it was considered more appropriate for me to work on the surface. So I worked in haulage on the surface, emptying trucks of rock and shale and carbide and things like that. And I did that, as I say, for two and three quarter years. What happened to you there? Then I went to Cambridge. I had got an exhibition in history at Trinity College, and they took me, and I was there for three years. Were you mixed up in university theatricals? No. In a funny way I wasn't. I mean, except in the Footlights, you know, which is a dramatic society which puts on a review at the end of the last term of each year. And I did write sketches for the Footlights, but I didn't do any acting. I'm a I I think I'm a and have been all my life an actor Monkey, a sort of frustrated actor. Those sketches, was that the beginning of your writing? I think so, yes. I can't remember doing much before. And I don't think they were any good. I I think they were very

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I'm up to her efforts. Well, nevertheless, you've started, so let's break here for your second record. What's that to be? Well, it is a symphony by Haydn.

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I have an immense and passionate respect for Haydn.

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The one I've selected is number fifty-three. It's called L'Imperial and I

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admire it extravagantly because of its craftsmanship and its joy.

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and I would feel always that I could never tire of this attitude to music and to life.

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this confidence and this happiness.

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Part of the first movement of Haydn's Symphony No. fifty three, L'Imperiale, Neville Mariner conducting the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields.

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You started writing thrillers with your twin brother Antony. That's right, yes. It was just after the time in the coal mines. And actually the first thriller I wrote

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Surprisingly, I wrote by myself, and

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I published it under pseudonym

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because my brother and I decided then to collaborate on other novels, and so I used my first name and his first name, so that we wrote under the name of Peter Antony. We did three altogether.

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M.

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He, of course, it is very much his world, the world of the Dede. He stayed with the throne. Just to mention one play of his, Sleuth. Absolutely, and does it brilliantly and extraordinarily.

Peter Shaffer6:56

He stayed after mentioning

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didn't actually stay with the World Othello as such, although I always believe that the

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Little.

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really the tiny experience I had of writing them with with Tony.

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Helped me enormously.

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What was your next step? You went off to the United States. I went off to the United States, yes. Oddly enough, I found myself when I left university, I I came to believe myself really totally unemployable.

Peter Shaffer7:17

I went off to

Peter Shaffer7:18

Uh

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Anyway, I went to America.

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I'd met some American friends during my years at Cambridge, and I thought that must be rather marvellous to go there. And I did go there, and I worked

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In New York City

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For three years really, from nineteen fifty one to nineteen fifty four it was. Doing what? I worked uh for a firm of booksellers, and then I worked in the New York Public Library in their acquisitions department. That meant ordering books. And you weren't doing any writing?

Peter Shaffer7:50

And you want

Presenter7:51

No. Oh, yes, I was, actually, under the blotter, as it were. In the long and rather boring watches of the afternoon, I was writing a play called The Salt Land, which was a play, a tragic play, about Israel, which had just been founded as a State.

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And that finally was done. When I returned here, which I did in 1954, I returned to England.

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and got a job with Boosey and Hawkes, the music publishers, and in their symphonic department.

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of music and at the same time I was lucky enough to have this play

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Done.

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On television. It was written for the stage, but it was done on television.

Peter Shaffer8:21

Mm-hmm.

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And uh it had uh

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Peter Wingard in it, and I was immensely excited by the reaction to it.

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by the fact that people liked it very much.

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And uh

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You know, it confirmed me in

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the hope that I could

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possibly write a a play. What was your first play to be presented in the theatre? It was called Five Finger Exercise. A very successful play.

Peter Shaffer8:47

Blonde was

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Indeed, yes, yes, it we had a lo a long and very happy round at the c the comedy theatre. It was done in nineteen fifty eight. On the strength of that you gave up the music publishing. I did, yes, completely. Well, in fact I had left it just before.

Peter Shaffer9:01

I did.

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and I subsisted, you know, on what one could. You know, the salt land, which I've just referred to, was very helpful because uh I had some money from it. And then I wrote this play, Five Finger Exercise, and oddly enough,

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I sent it to uh a friend who a gir a girl who worked for HM Tennant, who was the great

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producers of that day and uh

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The director of that firm showed it to

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John Giog.

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who read it apparently on the beach at Venice, and said I must direct this, and I was then introduced to him.

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And we all had dinner and I was terrible I remember it now very clearly I to this day I was so in awe of him as a an actor and uh

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Performer that I didn't quite know how to speak at all, you know, and it was very extraordinary because he was on his side, he's a very nervous man, so there were two nervous people at the table. But it was as quick as that. You sent it to tenants, and it was accepted. Yes, it was. Right. Well, there you are, you had your first success. And he directed it. John directed it. Yes, yes, yes. Record number three.

Speaker 39:55

But it will

Peter Shaffer9:55

Does credit?

Peter Shaffer9:57

And it was accepted.

Peter Shaffer10:01

And he do

Peter Shaffer10:02

Understand.

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Mozart. To me the piano concertos of Mozart are the most marvellous of all his many marvellous compositions.

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A moza concerto played by Mara Hess.

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I ask for Mara Hess because when I first came really to love music with the same passion that I loved the theatre, Mara Hess was one of my

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Heroines, saints.

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She seemed to me an absolutely astounding musician, a great, great lyrical pianist, and with the passage of time

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Having heard many other marvellous pianists, I see no reason to alter my original feeling.

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The minuet from the third movement of the Mozart Piano Concerto No. nine in E flat, De Mara Hesse with the Perpignon Festival Orchestra.

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You were to have one more spell of being on some one's payroll. You became a music critic. I did, for Time and Tide, and I enjoyed that enormously. I mainly concentrated on opera. Of course it's a slightly odd position to have been in, to be a critic, because in fact

Presenter12:11

On the whole, one tends to view critics with a certain reserve.

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Yes, especially a dramatist, I find. Yes, exactly. What was your next play? It was a double bill called The Private Ear, the Public Eye. There were two plays.

Peter Shaffer12:17

Yeah.

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They stood.

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Maggie Smith and Kenneth Williams.

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And that was done at the Globe Theatre? With a very small cast. Very small cast, yes. And a five-finger exercise, of course, had been not surprisingly for five people. Then after those small cast, you wrote an epic, a spectacular piece with a large cast and a huge canvas, The Royal Hunt of the Sun. Yes. That was a play about the invasion of Peru in the 16th century.

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By the Spaniards, the conquistadors. Yes. And it was done at Chichester on that open stage. A rather remote subject. What inspired that interest? When I was ill.

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I had a stomach ailment. I

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Red

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Prescott's Conquest of Peru. I I wanted a long book to read. And it seemed to me an absolutely extraordinary story. And I had always wanted

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To recreate almost epic theatre.

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and put in

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Events which almost read absurdly on the page, like one, my favorite stage direction was, they now climb the Andes.

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And the marvel of it was that John Dexter, who directed it so brilliantly,

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came to read the play to me, because he believes in presenting plays objectively to their authors. And when he came to that passage about they climb the Andes, I rather nervously said, Well, yes, it's a bit flamboyant that and he looked at me and said, If you take that out, I'm not going to direct the play. And I thought, Here's my director, yes, indeed. You know, that was quite right. And so we did have an enormous stylized massacre. They did climb the Andes. We had an enormous scene at the end when they all

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came masked onto the m main square, as it was represented as being, of Cahamaca, the town of Cahamaca.

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to watch the sunrise and revive the the dead Inca. And John faithfully and enthusiastically followed my

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Desire.

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It fulfilled my desire, if you like, to create an epic theatre again.

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And we had wonderfully spectacular costumes, an enormous exum that exploded outwards like a great

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exploding flower and the Inca was revealed standing in the middle of it. I absolutely adored that production and I think the public loved it very much. The fact that it was an epic is is shown by the fact that it was quite soon afterwards uh adapted into an opera. Yes, it was, in in by Ian Hamilton.

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The uh compos Scottish composer. Record number four.

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Mendelssohn?

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The octet

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I think this piece

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which I love dearly, is one of the most astonishing pieces of music I know. It was written by Mendelssohn at the age of sixteen.

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It displays a total craftsmanship and learning.

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um not only way beyond his years, but way beyond anybody in our age, I think, really, in terms of presenting music of such pleasure and lightness and passion.

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And just sheer

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Joy again.

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The Octet in E-flat major by the sixteen-year-old Mendelsohn, played by the Vienna Octet, the opening of the work. Now a number of people have written successful full-length plays. Rather fewer have written a one-actor that's become an international success. And I'm referring, of course, to black comedy.

Speaker 316:45

Uh

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Um

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That play which

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I enjoyed rehearsing, I think, more than almost anything I've ever done because. You rewrote it at rehearsals, didn't you? Oh, yes. You see.

Peter Shaffer16:54

The re

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The idea came.

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Of that play, which is based on a Chinese idea to theatre. When the Peking Opera came here, they did a sketch.

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From a play

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Called Where Three Roads Meet.

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And it shows a bandit entering the room of a warrior. The warrior has laid himself down to sleep and put his sword beside him, and the bandit comes into the room and challenges him, and they fight. But the point of this scene is that it all takes place in the dark.

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as the characters.

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experience it. But we can see everything because the dark is full blazing light. It's represented by light. And it was both s incredibly funny and very alarming. And I thought, how extraordinary. I wonder if one could use that idea for an entire play, for a farce, because to my mind farce is very like melodrama. And I thought, yes.

Presenter17:50

That would be wonderful. Supposing a fuse occurred in a house the night of a very important party, important for the host, who had to show something, like a painting or something, to say a collector, and the l invited a lot of people, and the lights failed, and they all had to do whatever they had to do in the dark. We could see them.

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and they could not see each other.

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And I thought that was a lovely idea. Oddly enough, the difficulty was that that idea in itself

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Although very funny.

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was inadequate for

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say, an hour's entertainment. It w one would run out very quickly.

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Because some one would have a lighter, some one would have a candle.

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Some one would have a match, and if they didn't have any of these things, they would simply abandon the evening, wouldn't just sit there in the dark.

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And I s I was stuck for that for some time and I couldn't think how to get out of it until suddenly I said The answer is get someone in that room, preferably the host who has a reason suddenly for keeping them in the dark, i. e., he has stolen something. He doesn't

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wants them to see this. What could it be? And I suddenly thought, My God, it's the furniture It's all of it. He's stolen every bit of the furniture from his neighbour, and he's suddenly got to get it back in the dark.

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And that solved it. That solved the the the the the problem. But after that extraordinary run of success you then wrote a flop. Yes, The Battle of Shrivings.

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I did it with a lovely cast.

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John Gilgood?

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and Patrick McGee and

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Wendy Hiller

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And I spent a lot of time with it. It that c it came out of

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My experiences in America

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The Peace Movements, the Vietnam War, the protests against the Vietnam War.

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It was intentionally a political play.

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Set in a commune.

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And I the critics

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Sounds it very grim and very

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They didn't like it at all.

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Very wrong. And um

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It only ran about two months, I think, and then it came after. Your following play was on on a grim theme, but your greater success, Equus appalling story of a boy who blinded six horses. Absolutely. Now this was a challenging theme to make acceptable to.

Presenter20:06

An animal-loving English audience. Oh yes. Oh yes. But you see, it's very funny that you should say that because one of the jokes that I perhaps frivolously made about Equus was because it was an enormous success, Equus, in America also. I said that it was a a very scandalous event in England because it was cruel to horses, and in America because it was cruel to psychiatrists.

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Yeah.

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If it played in America with success, it must have played now in almost every country in the world. Yes, indeed. It really did. In the theatre you used these make-believe horses, masks, so that the boy's deed wasn't quite so distressing to the audience that it would otherwise have been. But in the film, of course, real horses were used. This was another matter. I think that was a terrible mistake, I must say. I mean, the literalism of the sequence, the end of the film, I thought was wrong, wrong-headed, and

Peter Shaffer20:38

Yeah, Moscow

Peter Shaffer20:46

Yes, yes.

Presenter20:54

In fact, disgusting. I can't look at that safe. Did you write the screenplay? I did. And I never intended that, however, to be that literal. I wanted it to be far more treated in quite a different way, in a sort of shadow play way.

Presenter21:07

We got to record number five, Peter. What's that? Stravinsky, the Symphony of Psalms. I think that this piece is one of the.

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absolutely great pieces of music of the twentieth century.

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And I would love to have this by me on that desert island, and particularly in those very lonely evenings.

Speaker 321:52

Lord is break.

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Igor Stravinsky conducting his own Symphony of Psalms, the CBC Symphony Orchestra and the Festival Singers of Toronto.

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What is your writing discipline? Do you work regular hours? I try to.

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I like to work in the mornings when I'm very much fresher. I like to work roughly say from

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nine or ten.

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till over the crown of the day till about two or three and then stop. I get tired after that time and I d I I don't think I do any good work after about two or three. Now your output is small.

Peter Shaffer22:44

No, you're

Peter Shaffer22:45

Yeah.

Presenter22:47

Yes, it takes me a very long time to write each play. How many versions? How many rewrites?

Presenter22:52

Well, I think my last play, Amadeus, it's taken me over almost three years to do one way or another, and I have written that I couldn't tell you how many times. I would have thought if I'd added it all up together, it must be ten times. Yes. Well, you write poetry. I mean, you you have the same approach of word polishing to your plays. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Where does one read your poetry, by the way? But one doesn't. I never publish it. I just like to do it, you know. I I may one day publish it. I would

Peter Shaffer23:14

But why doesn't I know?

Presenter23:19

I'm a bit nervous of it, because I I I never thought of myself as a poet, even though I write poetry. Now Amadeus, which you just mentioned, your latest play on the repertoire at the National Theatre.

Presenter23:30

A play

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Less about Mozart rather than about his great rival Salieri. Yes, indeed. Mozart died, as was once generally known, but it's now a a for a long forgotten scandal.

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Died accusing his rival Salieri.

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another composer, formidably, of having poisoned him.

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And uh my place Salieris

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Confession

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You see

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In eighteen twenty three he actually confessed to having done it.

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And I took that as my cue, that this would be Salieri's confession of what he actually did to the audience. He presents his confession.

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As if it were

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His last opera. The whole production is operatic.

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and he calls it the death of Mozart.

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Or did I do it?

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And one has to go, I hope, who will go, to the National in order to uh see if he did it. But the play is not really about that so much as the relationship of talent to genius.

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Let's get back to record number.

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Six we got to

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Schumann

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The piano concerto in A minor.

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One of my very favorite piano concertos.

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And particularly in this version I'd like to hear Dinu Lipati play it.

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I'd like to hear the last movement.

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It seems to me

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to contain more Joie de Vive than almost any

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Finale, I know. I just love this music.

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The closing passage of the Schumann Piano Concerto in A minor.

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Dino Luppati with the Philharmonia Orchestra.

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Let's go straight into your next record. What's that to be? We were talking about Joie de Vive. I would like some more Joie de Vive. I think one would need all one can get on that desert island, and I would like to hear.

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Diffledemas, part of Diffledemas.

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Particularly the ensemble Bruderlein, Schwesterlein, and I would like to ask for a special recording.

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That made by Clemence Kraus.

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And the Vienna Philharmonic, because this seems to me to represent what

Presenter26:32

Vienna was all about. I just adore this

Peter Shaffer26:45

Read a line which rest alive

Peter Shaffer26:51

But I was langed in a matter to me.

Peter Shaffer27:03

Mm.

Peter Shaffer27:05

You know I don't your best align.

Peter Shaffer27:09

Lost, lost, for loter, doomshan.

Peter Shaffer27:23

Immersively hide

Peter Shaffer27:26

Very northland.

Presenter27:34

An excerpt from the second act of Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus, the piano state opera production conducted by Clemens Krauss.

Presenter27:43

No. Well, if you can mine coal, you should be able to grab an existence anywhere. You could provide a shelter. Yes, I could do that, I think. Yes.

Speaker 327:48

You could have advisorship.

Peter Shaffer27:49

Yeah.

Presenter27:52

Clumsily, I'm not very good with my hands, as they say. I'm I I think that if I I would be forced to do it, and of course I would make shelter.

Presenter28:01

And practicality would urge one on. But I think it would be a fairly wonky shelter. I don't think that the walls would quite meet.

Presenter28:07

What about small craft? Would you try to escape?

Presenter28:09

Oh, I think I would, yes, in in the end. I uh it would of course be the most terrible tussle between timidity of trusting oneself to the empty seas and perpetually staying on the island. I think I would in the end, yes. Then it would be an act of desperation. Of desperation, yes.

Peter Shaffer28:21

Yeah.

Peter Shaffer28:23

Uh

Presenter28:25

Well, take it quietly. That's have record number eight, your last record. Mozart again.

Presenter28:30

And indeed, in one mood one could take all eight records and make them Mozart. He seemed to me an inexhaustible composer.

Presenter28:38

A l little known choice the chorus that opens the last scene of La Clamenza di Tito.

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And I think this is

Presenter28:46

Oh, about a minute and a half of the most glorious music I know.

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An excerpt from Mozart's La Clamenza di Tito.

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The accordus and orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, conducted by Colin Davies. Now if you could take only one disc out of the eight you've chosen.

Presenter30:01

I would take

Presenter30:02

The Mozart Piano Concerto, I think. I don't think one can ever tire I can't ever tire of of Mozart's piano concerto. And De Marajes. And De Marajetz. And you may take one luxury to the island. I would take a

Presenter30:14

A painting. I would take a Monet. I know exactly which Monet too. It's uh one of the mornings on the Seine, which reveals oh, dawn on the Seine and great hanging lilac coloured trees reflected in very still water. Where is the picture? It's in the Metropolitan Museum.

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in New York.

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And it would be for me very necessary to have an object of human skill around, and to conjure a landscape very different from the one I was looking at.

Presenter30:43

And you're allowed one book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, which are on the island, and we don't encourage big encyclopedias. Right. I w I it's an an obvious choice, I'm afraid, but a very meant one. I would take Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Presenter31:00

It's a book I

Presenter31:01

I have never finished, and always want to. I love that grand style. It's like listening to someone play the organ at full volume and with great skill.

Presenter31:10

I could always sort of start again with that one. It's long and magnificently told and it's almost inexhaustible. And I love the prose style. It's baroque again.

Presenter31:21

Gibbons' Decline and Fall, and thank you, Peter Shapper, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you very much.

Presenter31:28

Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 431:36

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.