Mortal Messengers on Broadway

To the extent that any subject can be said to dominate this Broadway season, that subject is the power and world view of the Roman Catholic Church, and the imperfectibility of its mortal messengers. One way or another, the fact of Catholicism, as an historical and contemporary force, has occupied the minds of a large number of dramatists in our time. Now it has come up for consideration in Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun and John Whiting’s The Devils, both costume plays, both written by Englishmen who are non-Catholic.

The Royal Hunt of the Sun is the kind of drama which, when produced on an open stage where the march of the Spanish conquistadors and the ritual dances of the Incas can be described in opulent images of sound, light and movement, receives a respect out of all proportion to its content. In a proscenium stage theater where, despite all the procession and pageantry, you must pay attention to the words and thoughts, the hollowness of Mr. Shaffer’s dramatic conceptualism is immediately evident. Briefly, his proposition is that Peru in the sixteenth century was a pagan paradise laid low by the Spanish invaders. The Incas were noble, uncorrupted savages until the white Christian made his murderous appearance. And of all the white murdering Christians none was as happily committed to pillage and destruction in the name of Jesus Christ as the Catholic priests.

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Nathan Cohen

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To the extent that any subject can be said to dominate this Broadway season, that subject is the power and world view of the Roman Catholic Church, and the imperfectibility of its mortal messengers. One way or another, the fact of Catholicism, as an historical and contemporary force, has occupied the minds of a large number of dramatists in our time. Now it has come up for consideration in Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun and John Whiting’s The Devils, both costume plays, both written by Englishmen who are non-Catholic.

The Royal Hunt of the Sun is the kind of drama which, when produced on an open stage where the march of the Spanish conquistadors and the ritual dances of the Incas can be described in opulent images of sound, light and movement, receives a respect out of all proportion to its content. In a proscenium stage theater where, despite all the procession and pageantry, you must pay attention to the words and thoughts, the hollowness of Mr. Shaffer’s dramatic conceptualism is immediately evident. Briefly, his proposition is that Peru in the sixteenth century was a pagan paradise laid low by the Spanish invaders. The Incas were noble, uncorrupted savages until the white Christian made his murderous appearance. And of all the white murdering Christians none was as happily committed to pillage and destruction in the name of Jesus Christ as the Catholic priests.