Peter Shaffer enjoys a prominent position among contemporary British dramatists as a writer who combines intellectual power with a keen awareness of the physical possibilities of the theatre. He is also a playwright of exceptional versatility and technical resource. He made his début with Five Finger Exercise (1958), a conventionally designed drama of middle-class family life, which left no doubt, however, of its author's mastery of plotting and fluency in dialogue. This was followed by a light-weight double-bill, The Private Eye and The Public Ear. His third play, The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964), the most ambitious conception of his career to date- a historical tragedy centred on the Spanish conquistador, Pizarro, and the Inca emperor Atahuallpa- scored an immediate success both for the vigour of its ideas and for its spectacular presentation of mime and movement. His next piece, Black Comedy, was an ingenious farce based on a reversal of light values, the actors supposedly being plunged into a black-out, although perfectly visible to the audience. Since then Peter Shaffer has written an ideological conversation-piece, The Battle of Shrivings, while his latest play, Equus (1973), might be described as a dramatic case-history: the piece is concerned, like his first, with the torments of adolescence but is presented with a more clinical setting and technique.

John Russell Taylor notices an unusual degree of detachment in Shaffer's work, a tendency to analyse emotions without too far engaging himself in them as a dramatist. But the essay also pays tribute to his steady development as a playwright and to his originality both as a man of the theatre and as a dramatic thinker.

John Russell Taylor has been film critic of The Times, and writes on the theatre, films and television for a number of journals; he is now teaching in the University of Southern California. His books include Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama (1962), Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear (1964), The Rise and Fall of the Well-Made Play (1967), and The Second Wave: British Drama for the Seventies (1971).