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h e a t r e
Yonadab
Yonadab, by Peter Shaffer (title role)
1985, Olivier, Royal National Theatre, London
directed by Peter Hall
from New Statesman, 13.xii.85
by Benedict Nightingale
 IT HAS been quite
a struggle trying to take Peter Shaffer as seriously as he's
always seemed to take himself; but, at "Yonadab," I
began at least to find myself able to do so. The play is, to
be sure, never very impressive and at moments positively maddening.
Isn't it time Shaffer got over his weakness for florid, gasping
rhetoric, the sort of overblown quasi-poetry that has people
'impaled on the inextricable point of pointlessness' or talks
of sex in terms of 'the hunter in the tangled forest where all
paths lead to the same blank clearing'? Yet isn't there something,
well, plucky about him too? In a world of mainly thin plays on
mainly monochrome subjects, isn't there a cranky heroism in the
way he leaps across the centuries feverishly banging away at
grand metaphysical themes that have foxed finer minds than his?
 Yonadab occurs some 2,500 years before
"The Royal Hunt of the Sun," 2,700 before "Amadeus"
and 2,900-odd before "Equus," yet brings together ideas
and obsessions to be found in all three. There's the envious
outsider, the man who feels himself emotionally and spiritually
deprived, yearning to acquire the capacities, gifts and strengths
he believes another unjustly to have been given. There's the
reaching for an ecstasy which invariably turns out to be impure,
imperfect, flawed or failed in some way. There's the outrage
at a universe that's perverse or empty or perversely empty; a
paradoxical mix of atheism and wishfulness rather similar to
that expressed by Beckett's Hamm, for whom God was 'that bastard
-- he doesn't even exist'. There's the hope, invariably disappointed,
that somehow human beings will so harness the twin powers of
love and creativity as themselves to become gods on earth.
 More specifically,
we're presented with Yonadab, unregarded hanger-on in King David's
court and 'voyeur extraordinary'. When the monarch's son Amnon
abjectly falls for his half-sister Tamar, this character encourages
him to rape her, for reasons that aren't altogether malicious
or smutty. At some strange, superstitious level of himself, Yonadab
semi-demi-believes his own argument, that incest will magically
transformt he couple into a Jewish equivalent of Osiris and Isis,
or Zeus and Hera, or some other dual divinity. But no such thing
happens, either then or later., when Absalom is similarly inveigled
into seeing sex with his sister as a short-cut to rapturous omnipotence.
Celestial love turns out to be 'just another fuck', the would-be
men-gods are exposed as credulous clods; Jehovah is revealed
as a sort of malevolent void; Yonadab is left feeling more peripheral,
doubting and derelict than ever; and only Tamar seems to gain.
In her indignation at the male world which has abused her, she
finds the cunning to get her revenge and the courage to become
an Old Testament sibyl, much visited by wronged wives and feared
by their husbands.
Shaffer's tale and Peter Hall's production
have their moments all right. Whenever Leigh Lawson's Amnon is
onstage, whether he's lugubriously coveting Wendy Morgan's Tamar
or stolidly stalking her or morosely mourning her sexual insufficiency,
the action comes to something that might without exaggeration
be called life. So it does at the murder of this woebegone clown-Caliban,
which happens very inventively and bloodily inside the diaphanous
curtains that cleverly switch from evoking tents or bedchambers
to being the grim, solid walls of grim, solid places. So it doe
when Patrick Stewart's peppy David is charismaticly holding court
or Anthony Head's Absalom, 'the incandescent prig', is displaying
his insufferable conceit, or Ms Morgan's Tamar is slyly beginning
to manipulate events her way.
But Shaffer isn't content to let his action
take its own course and suggest its own meaning. He doesn't trust
it adequately to cope with his obsessions, still less draw conclusions
from them. At any rate, he's all too evidently omnipresent himself,
commenting and arguing and interpreting and adjudicating in a
style that's sometimes nudging and coloquial, sometimes sententious
and sermonising, but either way leaves us in the audience scant
space to indulge what little capacity for intellectual speculation
we ourselves might possess. What's worse, his chosen mouthpiece
or megaphone is a single character, one who dominates the evening
without being very plausible or interesting in himself: Yonadab.
 The psychiatrist Dysart in "Equus"
and the composer Salieri in "Amadeus" were both expected
to narrate their respective stories and bring out those stories'
significance; but each of them could also claim some consistency
of character, and the latter a certain sombre fascination as
well. That's not the case with Yonadab, who seems a Biblical
Iago or Mephistopheles, an anachronistic version of the archetypal
man-in-the-dirty-mac, a humanist idealist and searcher-after-truth,
and a sardonically alienated rebel, depending on how Shaffer
is feeling and what his plot is wanting. It could, I suppose,
all add up to an intriguingly intricate character; and its failure
to do so could, I suppose partly be blamed on the actor playing
him. Alan Bates's built-in sneer [shown above in rehearsal] can
become splendidly eloquent, indeed rise to a sort of superciliousness
in excelsis, but scarecely convinces us we're in the presence
of someone who cares very much about metaphysical ultimates.
Yet that excuse won't quite do, because the
root problem is surely the writing. The sincerity
and seriousness of Shaffer's philosophic anguishings aren't in
doubt, and his instinctive theatricality has been demonstrated
in play after play. The trouble here, the reason one sometimes
gets the impression of being earnestly buttnholed by a man on
a soapbox in the middle of a grand opera without music, is that
those two elements fail to coalesce; and the case of Yonadab
is more contradictory still.
He's now a Shaffer surrogate passing himself
off as an objective creation, now a dramatic device posing as
a person, but either way he has to carry the play. It is too
large, curious and unwieldy a burden for so fragile, feeble and
lazily conceived a support.
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