Peter Shaffer: Roles, Rites, and Rituals in the Theater by Gene A. Plunka (review)

580 Book Reviews izer, his effort is still salutary in that the scholar and critic are assisted in becoming less chary of using psychoanalytic concepts, while the interested public is reminded that the greatest drama enlarges the expressive possibilities of OUf recognizable selves. Non-psychoanalytic readers certainly stand to benefit by Simon's book. ANDREW BRINK, TRINITY COLLEGE GENE A. PLUNKA, Peter Shaffer: Roles, Rites, and Rituals ill the Theater. Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press I988. Pp. 256. $32.50. Shaffer is remarkable among contemporary playwrights for having written drama both commercially successful and intellectually provocative. Beneath their apparent accessability - that theatrical intensity which has attracted large audiences - his plays are bewitchingly complex in idea, form, and language. Surprisingly, prior to the publication of Peter Shaffer: Roles, Rites and Rituals ill the Theater, Dennis Klein's was the only book concerned exclusively with Shaffer. Unlike Klein's strong study, the articles and reviews available provide uneven fare: for every thoughtful (and I don't mean adulatory) piece, there looms a host of writing hostile in spirit and naive in thesis. (Were Shaffer's plays less popular with the public, critics would, I suspect, leap to his defense; but since he pleases popular audiences, his work is condemned a priori as unsophisticated.) Certainly Shaffer does ,not make the critic's job easy: his plays resist ready classification, for he undertakes remarkable theatrical experiments (e.g., writing commercially successful drama grounded in Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty). And for me, this playwright held still another attraction: since the merits of much of Shaffer's work remained largely unexamined, the book on Shaffer on which I'd been working would illume in such critics that which was dark. But with the publication of this fine study, day came, J woke, and Plunka brought back my night: his book accomplishes admirably what I had undertaken. Roles, Rites. and Rituals presents Shaffer as an exponent of total theatre who "views the theater as a means of psychoanalytically exploring sociological, philosophical, and metaphysical ideas," the form and language of each play emerging from its function. The Introduction and first two chapters present a concise critical biography of the playwright and summarize Plunka's thesis: "Almost all of Shaffer's plays present a dialectic between a threatened, often isolated, individual trapped in a world of roles and codified behavior and his alter ego, an independent person who is not controlled by the desires and wishes of others." In the initial sections, Plunka investigates Shaffer's dramatic and intellectual debts and responds adroitly to the main objections raised by Shaffer's critics. Subsequent chapters offer close examinations of the plays (through to Amadeus). Each such study opens with a review of the play's stage history and a summation of its critical reception; these are followed by a detailed discussion of characterization, structure, theme, and mise-en-scene. Plunka does not treat the plays in isolation but traces recurring patterns of Book Reviews 581 characterization, content, theme, and fann among Shaffer's canon, including the detective fiction. His readings are comprehensive and fainninded: he identifies the weaknesses as well as the strengthSof both the drama and its criticism. His analyses of Amadeus, Equus, The Royal Hum o[ the Sun and Shrivillgs comprise the most thoughtful and persuasive writing on these plays to date. In the Conclusion, Plunka classifies Shaffer's protagonists according to the species of role-playing in which they engage, and he suggests a taxonomy of the plays' conflicts based on the emergent dialectic. The resultant schema offers an immensely useful method of approaching Shaffer's drama. One should not cease reading with the Conclusion. however: Plunka's copious, accurate notes are also worth attention. Note 6, pp. 223-24, for example, presents an extended discussion of the significance of the number 6 in Equus - the sort of material a lesser scholar would have inflated into an article. The book also includes a comprehensive, accurate primary and secondary bibliography and an index. Having of late been immersed in literary theory, I was initially concerned about Plunka's designation of Shaffer as " Sociologist of lbe Theater." My concern was twofold: first, Plunka does not define "sociological...