Peter Shaffer should be up there with the greats
Commercial success has a way of corroding critical regard. The more popular a playwright becomes, the more the critical establishment becomes suspicious of their intellectual credentials. Consider Peter Shaffer. He collected Tonys, an Oscar, a Golden Globe, a CBE and a knighthood, and yet his reputation has contracted to a single work. Shaffer’s Amadeus premièred at the National Theatre in London in 1979. A West End transfer followed, then Broadway. But it was Milos Forman’s 1984 film that propelled it into the stratosphere, embedding itself so completely in our cultural consciousness that the rest of his work has never quite escaped its shadow. Shaffer’s work resists easy categorisation.
