PETER'S PRINCIPLES

Theater

The limelight-shy playwright Peter Shaffer brings his British hit Lettice and Lovage to Broadway

JOHN HEILPERN

Peter Shaffer's delightful play Lettice and Lovage is a mad tour de force. It may also be the world's first conservation comedy. Difficult, if not impossible, to summarize, the twists and turns of the action involve an unlikely friendship between two quintessentially English ladies, the execution of Charles I, a guided tour through the dullest stately home in England, and a potential plot to blow up the most hideous buildings in London. By chance Lettice expressed views about modem architecture close to those of Prince Charles before he thought of them. The play, which had the English howling with laughter at its image of themselves, arrives on Broadway this month, starring Maggie Smith, for whom Shaffer wrote the show. It's in better shape, or at least in a different shape, than when it first played so successfully in London.

Peter Shaffer is his own severest critic, the only playwright I know of who rewrites his plays after they're hits. When Lettice and Lovage had been running for a year in the West End, he returned to the script, cut it, and rewrote the end. "It's not that Lettice and Lovage is now really different,'' Shaffer says diffidently. "I think it has become more itself. I hope it has. But, you know, you can change an entire play by changing a single word.''

Kindly prove it, I said.

"O.K. You have a play that hinges on a trial scene. The verdict is guilty. Now add the word 'Not.' Not guilty! There you are. You've changed an entire play in a word."

Michael Blakemore, the director of Lettice and Lovage (and also of City of Angels on Broadway), says of Shaffer, "His enthusiasm is so intense you often feel admonished because you haven't got a comparable sense of joie de vivre. He's a delight to work with because he's extraordinarily open to ideas. But at the end of the day, he has a very firm editorial sense of what he wants a play to be, what are the bad notes, and the good."

"He adores actors, treating them with relish," says Simon Callow, the original Mozart of Amadeus. "My principal memory of him is laughing. He also communicates anxiety with great grace. During Amadeus, he constantly gave me only one note: 'Lighten!' The theater for him is written. He writes great roles for actors to seize upon. He wouldn't write that way if he didn't like actors."

Which is why Shaffer wrote Lettice and Lovage, with its virtuoso role for Maggie Smith. (Also, she asked him to.) Ms. Smith appeared in Shaffer's The Private Ear and the Public Eye twentyeight years ago, and they've been friends ever since. The actress is a perfectionist, known to stay up half the night worrying about her performance, yet onstage she makes us laugh on sight. She can be glacially camp, and is a riot in Lettice. What's her secret? Shaffer says, "Among great actors in theater there's a belief that you play everything, including King Lear, as comedy. Not for laughs—but with comic timing. That's what Maggie does. And it's why she can play anything. She was, for example, one of the finest Hedda Gablers I've ever seen. She's an enchantress, and audiences finally want to be put under a performer's spell. Her timing is magical. She can make nothing dull."

Shaffer has lived in New York for some thirty years, but he remains unmistakably English. He divides his time between Manhattan, which he calls the "city of light," and London, the "city of gray," enjoying the best of both worlds: New York for its exuberance, for its baroque rooftop architecture and high-definition skyscapes; London for old friends, for life that still takes place inside houses (as opposed to restaurants), for escape to the filtered water light of the English countryside. He's a cultivated man, boyish in his sixties, with a strong and mobile face that gives the English game away: it betrays emotion. He is animated, enthusiastic, usually sunny, thin-skinned, and compulsive. Shaffer is sometimes affectionately called "Peter Chatter"; Maggie Smith nicknames him "Tigger," after the bouncy tiger in Winnie the Pooh. He is bouncy, but it disguises an inner strength. Among Shaffer's unlikely steps toward a life in the theater were almost three years working in a coal mine.

"Among great actors in theater there's a belief that you play everything, including King Lear, as comedy. Not for laughs-but with comic timing. That's what Maggie does."

He seems unworldly. He's always late, late for a very important date. In his battered Burberry and sensible shoes, he might strike you as an eccentric professor or a guide to historic buildings and national relics. When I met him at his apartment in a Regency terrace in Kensington, London, an old manual typewriter on his cluttered desk was submerged, mysteriously, in socks.

At an elegant dinner party in Manhattan a while ago, some of us were glad to see Peter Shaffer there, eager for the fray. He makes you feel the unexpected might happen. "Yes! Yes!" he was saying solicitously to Bianca Jagger. "That's certainly true." But then, over dinner with Joseph Papp, Sidney Lumet, and assorted flotsam, Papp—the boss of the New York Shakespeare Festival—made his customary pre-emptive strike. He was saying how his productions of Shakespeare exclude English actors as he imitated the declamatory classical style of the English ham actor in a way that sounded, unfortunately, like Shaffer's idol, Sir John Gielgud.

Shaffer was steeling himself to release an Exocet missile as Sidney Lumet said, "Who's that supposed to be, Joe?"

"It was Sidney who started it," said Shaffer later. But it was an unstoppable Shaffer who finished it, with a rousing speech of English jingoism that fell just short of Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt. What he said to Papp, in the essentials, was this: "Intolerable! I find this an intolerable position. You exclude the English in New York from performing Shakespeare, but if you did that to any other group of people, it would be called discrimination. I can only conclude that this is the greatest compliment you can pay us. You're probably afraid of us. Why parody Gielgud? He's only the greatest actor in the English-speaking world. This is what he is. In the world! And he is not good enough, apparently, for you. He is not even worth learning anything from. This is ludicrous! And to imply, as you do, that the English speak Shakespeare less well than Americans is absolutely ludicrous. Shakespeare, after all, was an Englishman."

Papp took it quite well, considering. But was Shaffer saying, I asked him in London, that Americans can't act Shakespeare?

"Of course not! The American speaking voice is supple and strong and marvelous. It's actually close to Elizabethan speech patterns. But Shakespeare needs an enormous formal training. Just to give some newcomer or movie star a chance isn't good enough. People with scarcely the ability to play 'Three Blind Mice' shouldn't play a Beethoven concerto."

For so famous a man—Peter Shaffer is now one of the foremost dramatists of our time, and among the wealthiest—little has really been known about him. The celebrity circuit isn't for him, and personal wealth for a certain kind of middle-class Englishman can be slightly embarrassing, like debt. He lives modestly, collecting solid eighteenth-century English oak, Ruskin watercolors, a few antique prints. ("Never own anything you couldn't afford to lose," he told me, making it sound menacing, "or you will be owned by it.") He has a piano in each of his apartments, a Bliithner in London: he can play some Bach, most Haydn, a lot of Mozart, but begins to falter, he says, at the Etudes of Chopin. He is very much a man of the theater, but not exclusively in it. Among his friends outside the theater world are a child psychologist, a painter, a magistrate, a finearts connoisseur, a film critic, a sculptress, and a Rothschild. It was the late James Mossman, a top political correspondent for the BBC and a friend of Shaffer's since their days at Cambridge University, who told him a true story he had heard about a young boy who seduced a girl in a stable and blinded several horses. Two years later, Shaffer finished Equus.

Another old friend, Sir John Gielgud, gave him his first break. In 1958, when Shaffer was thirty-two, Gielgud directed his first stage play, Five Finger Exercise, which brought the fledgling Shaffer instant fame on both sides of the Atlantic. As always with Sir John, the words tumble out of him: "He says I discovered him? How terribly sweet! Peter has a modesty which is so very admirable. I got on awfully well with him. I liked the way he persevered. You know he changes his plays even after they've opened? Enormous industry! He has a wonderful stage sense, of course. A great gift for the magic of theater, which is so rare nowadays. I'm very fond of him. How is he?"

"Persevering," I replied.

"Oh, good. Of course, people remember his tremendous successes. But he wrote a play called Shrivings that was a terrific flop. I was in it. I hear he's rewritten it, but he hasn't sent it to me. Of course, since Amadeus and Equus, people forget how good he is at comedy. He once based one of his characters on a fortune-teller we all used to visit at the end of Brighton Pier. Her name was Madame Binnie. She used to fish ..."

Here's Peter Shaffer recalling with delight how he got that first break. The story, like the eccentric world of Lettice and Lovage, could have happened only in England. He was working as a humble assistant at the London music publisher Boosey & Hawkes, which is to music what Turnbull & Asser is to shirts. ''I can't remember exactly what I did there," Shaffer explains. "But they were thinking of promoting me to the brass-band department."

So Shaffer left Boosey & Hawkes to plunge into writing Five Finger Exercise. He sent it off, and six months later he was contacted by a Mr. Perry, summoning him to the Globe Theatre. ''I didn't really know what it was about. I didn't trust myself to think it might be about my play. So I turned up nervously at his office in the theater and the first words he said to me were 'You've got to have a maid.' "

Only Peter Shaffer could acknowledge the presence of God "in bars 34 to 44 of Mozart's Masonic funeral music."

"But, Mr. Perry," Shaffer replied, "I can't afford one."

"Now, don't be tiresome!" thundered Perry, who, unknown to the naive Shaffer, was managing director of H. M. Tennent, the most powerful theater producers of the day. "You must have a maid in your play. You've got this grand lady living in a country cottage and she wouldn't do her own cooking. She must have a maid!"

"But what," Shaffer asked earnestly, "would she do in terms of the plot?"

And he replied, "Make the souffles."

Even as a novice, Shaffer stood firm. He said he'd consider it. "But does this mean," he asked incredulously, "you're thinking of producing the play?"

"Of course! Or you wouldn't be here, would you? Now, is John Gielgud suitable to you as a director?"

Today, Shaffer says: "I could hardly speak." He was an innocent then, and his life was transformed in that moment. Had it not been, one might easily imagine him still buried anonymously in the Dickensian world of Boosey & Hawkes. Gielgud, excited to meet him and discuss the new production, took him out to lunch. "I see it all in bamboo, don't you?" he announced.

"But, Sir John," Shaffer stammered, "the play is set in the English countryside."

"Oh," said Gielgud. "Silly me!"

Shaffer is practically bent double with laughter as he tells the story. Those were his theater roots: the West End world of the 1950s, class-ridden and amazing. He's still stagestruck.

He was bom in Liverpool in 1926— "pre-Beatles," he says—the son of a real-estate investor, who was successful on and off. His twin brother is Anthony Shaffer—best known for writing Sleuth. They both studied at Cambridge, Peter winning a scholarship in history. There, the Shaffer twins turned out detective stories together, published under the pseudonym of Peter Antony. (The detective was a Mr. Verity, who smoked cigars while eating jam tarts.) A younger brother, a biophysicist who inherited the family real-estate business and became a painter, joined them at Cambridge. But what was a nice Jewish boy like Peter Shaffer doing down the mines?

"My duty," he explains, without a trace of irony. "We all did it. Had to be done!" It was the time of compulsory national service in England, and Shaffer's near three years slogging in the mines have left him without bitterness or particular regret. In spite of chaotic appearances, he's a pragmatist. ("Had to be done!") The mines left him with muscles, and a bleeding ulcer. "But the ulcer wasn't about being down the mines," he says. "It was about reminding me of the thing I most wanted to do in life. Which was to write plays. I've wanted to be a playwright all my life, but I bought what was expected of me. I bought the Puritan untruth that serious work was the professions. It was the Law, or Medicine, or Business. The theater was frivolous, you see. And I bought it. So I denied myself the theater until I was in my thirties, and thought of myself as unemployable and invisible."

After university, Shaffer drifted anonymously through a number of jobs— wage slave in the New York Public Library, airline-terminal worker, Doubleday book salesperson, waiter, Boosey & Hawkes. He was a music critic for a while, and would have made a fine one. At least, only Shaffer, in a later article on Amadeus, could acknowledge the presence of God "in bars 34 to 44 of Mozart's Masonic funeral music." But his youthful and perpetual wonder at the divine inspiration of great music led, of course, to his writing Amadeus; his fascination with history to the epic drama of The Royal Hunt of the Sun; his love of the magic of theater itself to the Peking opera that inspired a classic farce, Black Comedy; and his passion—uncharacteristic, un-English passion—for the battle between jealous, average outsiders and the gifted of this world to the incomprehending Salieri, the conquistador Pizarro, and the psychiatrist Dysart in Equus.

Had Shaffer only known it, this was all there when he chose, by default, to be invisible. It was there in its seed, age six or seven, at school in Liverpool, when the teacher told the class certain stories every Friday afternoon. One day he told them there was a handsome prince. And suddenly a ghost appeared, telling the prince that his father had been murdered by his uncle. "Revenge me!" cried the ghost. "Iam your father!" What will the prince do? Is he imagining it? Is he mad? "Well, children," said the teacher, "that's all we've time for this week! I'll tell you what happens next week."

"I couldn't," says Shaffer, "wait. It was the most formative moment of my life! It was also Hamlet, but I didn't know that then. It was just a wonderful story. It's what theater is all about. It's all about stories!"

And it's the way you tell 'em. So, in its mad, comic way, Lettice and Lovage now tells its story on Broadway. And bubbling within it are many of Peter Shaffer's enthusiasms—for words, for farce, for architecture, for fantasy and daring, even for the gray old English.

"Light them up!" cries Maggie Smith as Lettice (a name derived from the Latin for "gladness"). " 'Enlarge! Enliven! Enlighten!' That was my mother's watchword. She called them the three E's. She was a great teacher, my mother. ' '

"Really?" says her friend. "At what institution?"

"The oldest and best," comes the triumphant reply. "The Theatre."