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Peter Shaffer's Yonadab
| Article
# : |
11083 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1986 |
955 Words |
| Author
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Chris Ross
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"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]
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