Peter Shaffer: Playwright whose dramas Amadeus and Equus won Tony awards

Peter Shaffer, a leading British playwright whose Tony-winning dramas Equus and Amadeus explored the male psyche through the entwined anguish of dual protagonists, died in Co Cork this week. He had travelled to Ireland to celebrate his 90th birthday with close friends and relations. Shaffer, who lived in Manhattan for more than 40 years, died in a hospice in Curraheen, a district outside Cork city.

Valued by critics and audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, Shaffer saw his reputation amplified by well-received movie renderings of his plays. He won an Academy Award for his film adaptation of Amadeus, about the rivalry between Antonio Salieri, the court composer for Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the precocious composer whose magnificent gifts thrill the older man and fill him with malicious jealousy as he realises his own consignment to mediocrity.

As a playwright Shaffer was ambitious, probing in a variety of genres. His first Broadway play, Five Finger Exercise, was followed by The Private Ear and The Public Eye, a pair of one-act comedies involving lopsided romances and a third wheel, and The Royal Hunt of the Sun, about the 16th-century vanquishing of the Incas by the Spanish.

All were received with at least respectful (and often quite admiring) critical notices, and ran on Broadway for several months. But Shaffer’s best known and most substantial work lay ahead.

He drew his inspiration for Equus from a story told to him by a friend about a British stable boy who had compulsively blinded a number of horses in his care after being seduced by a young woman on the floor of the stable. The horses were around them ostensibly, at least in the mind of the boy, watching them.

From that episode, the play evolved into an intimate, tense wrangle between the boy, Alan Strang, and his psychiatrist, Dr Martin Dysart. The psychiatrist’s own chill marriage, doubts about the efficacy of his profession and interest in ancient Greek history add depth to the relationship and the resonance of myth to the story of the boy’s gruesome and mysterious act.

In Amadeus, set in Vienna in the late 18th and early 19th century, Shaffer took on the mystery of genius – in this case in the guise of a musical visionary who imagined whole, elaborately gorgeous compositions in his head, but who presented himself to the world as a boor and a self-destructive libertine. That Mozart's music, of which Salieri speaks reverently as "the voice of God," could be created by such an unholy man, is a torment that Salieri cannot abide, and he works to undermine Mozart's success – and his health – only to be riddled by guilt for decades after Mozart dies at 35.

The play opened at the National Theatre in London in 1979, directed by Peter Hall, with Paul Scofield as Salieri and Simon Callow as Mozart. The next year, with Ian McKellen and Tim Curry in the leading roles, Hall staged it on Broadway, where the production won five Tonys and ran for three years. (There was a Broadway revival, also directed by Hall, with David Suchet as Salieri and Michael Sheen as Mozart, in 1999.)

Amadeus was widely scrutinised for historical accuracy, and scholars later debunked the portrayal of Mozart as a puerile genius poisoned by Salieri. (One Mozart biographer, Robert M Gutman, who died in May, maintained that Mozart died from illness, possibly rheumatic fever.)

Shaffer admitted that though there may have been some rivalry between the two men, he took considerable artistic licence in creating their characters and ratcheting up Salieri’s antipathy to such a malevolent degree. “The problem with the Mozart-Salieri story is that there is no end,” he said in an interview with the William Inge Center for the Arts, in Inge’s hometown, Independence, Kansas. “One survived the other by 32 years. It’s not much of a climax. There had to be a scene between them, a confrontation scene. In a play, that’s what drama demands.”

It was a scene he rewrote over and over again, he said, finally settling on what he called an offering – Mozart’s offering up a score of the unfinished Requiem Mass in D minor to a masked patron, who is, of course, Salieri. For the 1984 film, directed by Milos Forman and starring Tom Hulce as Mozart and F Murray Abraham as Salieri, Shaffer wrote an entirely new ending, imagining a scene in which Mozart, on his deathbed, dictates part of the Requiem as Salieri scribbles out the score. The music is played on the film’s soundtrack during the scene, and as Salieri recognises the glory of the composition, it is almost as though he is receiving, as if by communion wafer, a morsel of godliness.

That, Shaffer said, was for him the most exciting scene in the film, because it “breaks all the rules that I’d ever been taught about cinema, that it has to be visual and the sound doesn’t matter very much.”

Peter Levin Shaffer was born on May 15th, 1926, in Liverpool, along with his fraternal twin, Anthony, and grew up in London, where his father worked in real estate. The twins attended St Paul's School in London until 1944, when they went to work in the coal mines of Yorkshire and Kent for three years as an alternative to military service. In 1947 Peter Shaffer won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied history.

After his graduation in 1950, the brothers published How Doth the Little Crocodile?, the first of several mystery novels they wrote under the joint pseudonym Peter Anthony. Anthony Shaffer, who studied law, eventually became a noted playwright himself, winning a best-play Tony before his brother did, for the 1971 murder mystery Sleuth, which ran for 1,222 performances, eclipsing the runs (barely) of Equus and Amadeus.

The brothers were reportedly close and on largely good terms, but it is notable that Peter Shaffer’s plays so often focused on pairs of male rivals – Pizarro and Atahualpa, Dysart and Strang, Salieri and Mozart – whose competition delivers both nourishment and suffering.

"We are both poisoned, Amadeus," Salieri says at the end of the play. "I with you; you with me." After leaving Cambridge, Peter Shaffer soon moved to New York, where he worked in a bookstore and at the New York Public Library before returning to England. His first play, The Salt Land, about the fledgling state of Israel, was produced on television by the BBC in 1954. Four years later he scored his first major theatrical success with Five Finger Exercise. Directed by John Gielgud, it opened on Broadway in 1959 with a cast that included Jessica Tandy, Roland Culver and Brian Bedford.

Shaffer was knighted in 2001 and his brother Anthony died that year. He is survived by another brother, Brian. At midpoint in his career, in a 1975 interview in the London Times, Shaffer admitted to a "sense of fulfilment" stemming from the work he had done. He also looked ahead. "When I'm 100," he said, "if I manage to write lots of plays, I can read them all in a row and it may give me some vague sense – only vague – of what I am, and was."

– New York Times Service