Succeeding At Extremes

By Christopher Porterfield

TITLE: THE GIFT OF THE GORGON

AUTHOR: PETER SHAFFER

WHERE: BARBICAN CENTER, LONDON

THE BOTTOM LINE: High-flown themes and high-risk theatricality are brought off with fierce conviction.

The case against Peter Shaffer is well established. Shaffer himself has presented it, in such hugely successful plays as Equus (1973), Amadeus (1979) and Lettice and Lovage (1987). He is stagy, melodramatic, given to portentous evocations of myth, an obsessive juggler of the duality between head and heart, reason and inspiration, ordered restraint and exalted excess. Of course the same plays, viewed from another angle, make a strong case in Shaffer's favor. He is intensely theatrical, intellectually provocative, inventive with plot and setting despite the single-mindedness of his themes -- in short, entertaining and fascinating even at his most over-the-top.

In his new play Shaffer, 67, characteristically makes no attempt to resolve his contradictions or modify his extremes. If anything he defiantly offers more of both, as if he had taken a motto from William Blake: "You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough." The Gift of the Gorgon, a Royal Shakespeare Company production that will open a limited run in the West End next week after three months at the RSC's base in the Barbican Center, is drenched in stage blood, Greek mythology and high rhetoric about creativity, violence and justice. Once again, Shaffer somehow makes riveting drama out of it all.

His protagonist is Edward Damson (Michael Pennington), a famous playwright for whom the theater is a religion and its most sacred ritual the revenge- murder that he sees at the heart of Greek tragedy. Edward has a fanatical faith in the cleansing purity of blood vengeance. His wife Helen (Judi Dench), who holds deeply to a liberal belief in fairness and mercy, is his muse and counterbalance -- playing Athena, goddess of reason, to his Perseus, the mythological hero who killed the monstrous Gorgon. The play hinges on the passionate dialectic between these two, which turns ominous when it leaves the realm of playwriting and becomes a struggle for psychic survival.

The story is unfolded by Helen in flashbacks after Edward's exile to a Greek island and mysterious death. Her listener, a young professor of theater and would-be biographer, is also the playwright's unacknowledged son from a previous marriage, desperate to know and not to know the father being revealed to him.

This framing device is rather labored, but in Peter Hall's brilliant production -- complete with stylized masked figures pantomiming the mythological background -- the action it encompasses builds to a fierce momentum. Pennington and particularly Dench perform with such conviction that one forgets there is anything preposterous about their characters. This time Shaffer does not stack the deck in his perennial intellect-ecstasy debate but leaves the outcome ambiguous. In a gory, disturbing finale, both Edward and Helen must plumb, in their ways, the terrible meaning of the Perseus legend: that the slayer of the Gorgon becomes the thing he or she destroys.