"One squalid man attaining divinity." In his new play Yonadab, Peter Shaffer returns to his recurring theme; man's search for God and attainment of divinity through union with God. And as the main character in this play comments that no man is so ruined as a man "emptied of his obsession," we should not be dismissive of this, especially since he has new things to say.
Set in the Israel of King David, c. 1,000 B.C., Yonadab tells the story of the rape of David's daughter Tamar by his son Amnon, and other tragic events that follow. The character Yonadab is mentioned twice in the Bible. In the book of Samuel he is recorded as planning the rape, and later as reassuring the king that though Amnon has been murdered, his other sons are all alive and well. Samuel also credits Yonadab as being a very subtle man. Shaffer remembered these passages from his youth when he came across Dan Jacobson's novel "The Rape of Tamar," and some fifteen years later he has supplied us with his theatrical invention of the events that took place.
As a typical Shaffer character, Yonadab is driven by two forces. On the one hand he bears resentment against Tamar for her disdain of him, and against David for his aggressive patriarchal authority, and he sees a sexual scandal as a way to avenge himself. On the other hand, though a professed atheist, who hates the concept of a jealous self-contained male Jehovah, he has a faint hope that the old gods may still be alive, and that through them a golden age of gentleness and peace may come to pass.
Stemming from the understanding of the ancients that God must have male and female characteristics, His [and Her] representation on earth should take the form of a man and a woman. A perverse interpretation of this in Egyptian and other civilizations was that brothers and sisters of royal lineage would marry and rule as divine beings, the justification for the incest being that it kept the blood pure.
Yonadab is a voyeur and a schemer, and when Amnon tells him of his lust for his sister he seizes the chance to help him consume his passion. The result is of course disastrous. He is also a raconteur and often steps out of the play to speak the audience in colloquial twentieth-century language. As Yonadab, Alan Bates is on stage almost throughout the play, and is spellbinding as he delivers the most glorious, rich, and often alliterative rhetoric that Shaffer has conjured up
The stage setting creates a sense of the archaic and Yonadab's uncertain search for the numinous. Gossamer curtains inscribed with Jewish writing become solid white walls or diaphanous veils with the change of lighting, and the set piece stagings of the rape and Amnon's subsequent murder are visually compelling. But there is something unconvincing in the manner of most of the supporting characters. Leigh Lawson is suitably tragic as the wretched Amnon driven wild by his desire for his sister, but Wendy Morgan's Tamar is an English rose, not a desert orchid. She does, however, grow throughout the play and is riveting in her triumph after engineering the death of Amnon and the downfall of Absalom. She thus brings out a very topical and important message: That rampant, destructive feminism is a direct result of man's mistreatment of woman, and that those who condone it are as guilty as those who initiate it.
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