Customer Reviews

Five Finger Exercise

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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Shaffer's work seems to be synonimous with mystery, impact, ritual and theatrical pyrotechnics. How strange, then, to see him in this, his first major play, to see him attempting something very close to a kitchen sink drama.

Indeed, there is a smack of Ibsenesque drawing-room realism so far removed from the 'total theatre' of Equus and Royal Hunt that some readers may find disconcerting. But, nevertheless, Shaffer's tender understanding of the emotional pressures of middle-class family life make this play just as extraordinary and gripping as any of the later, more popular successes.

The play does exhibit Shaffer's characteristic love of linguistic versatility and, as with all his plays, is extremely relevent. I for one cannot but feel moved by the characters' tender denunciation of love and sexuality.

A must for anyone wanting to find new layers to an original and penetrating writer.

If you loved Amadeus and Equus then honestly you probably won't like this play.

Unlike either Amadeus or Equus the characters are decidedly NOT larger than life, the issues treated are likewise lacking in stature and unlike even his later Private Ear/Public Eye couplet and one of my personal favorites Lettice and Lovage there isn't even fun dialogue presented to pass the time.

In other words, it's a non Peter Shaffer Peter Shaffer play but still it is an early effort by a guy who would be called the reincarnation of Shakespeare for the strength of his later works and for that reason it's worth a look. Now when I saw worth a look I mean for people who are interested in Shaffer.

Even at this early stage in his career fascinations that would become all too current are on full display: Shaffer's ability to create gripping dialogue, his delight with music and his fascination with young and old men in crisis that would become the leit motif of Equus and to a lessor but still significant degree, Amadeus.

Honestly I can't tell you that I actually liked this play but with what Shaffer would go on to do, I couldn't help but be fascinated by it watching as I did in its ambling rumanitions signs of Shaffer's later genius. How he went from this to his later greatness is beyond me, no less a riddle than the ones he would later create.

What is a Five Finger Exercise? Perhaps it is an allusion to the hands unique members, each with a different shape and function, frequently working together yet separate and able to be isolated? Perhaps it is a reference to a musical practice for the mastery of individual fingers within the complexity of a piano score. Maybe it is an overt symbol for a story of five people, bound by a home, a palm, in which they branch off and come together in differing combinations to quarrel and agree-a family.
Whatever the case, the Peter Shaffer play Five Finger Exercise is a unique and interesting early work by the master behind The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Equus and Amadeus. The Harrington family is decidedly upper middle class English. Father Stanley is the self-made bread winner through his successful furniture business, while mother Louise is a continental Francophile, concerned with culture and liberal ideals. They are the "saloon and the salon," respectively. Son Clive, 19, is a burgeoning man, newly at Cambridge, whose adolescent angst reflects his own internal hormonal coming of age and his lifelong presence amidst his parent's rows. Daughter Pamela is fourteen and the apple of all eyes, without the cynicism and hurt of the others, unknowing of the bad world outside and coming into romantic notions through her new tutor Walter, a German expatriate. Walter is a few years older than Clive, but worldly and understanding like none of the Harrington's.
Without going into the arch of the tale, Five Finger Exercise is a vision of post WWII England's concerns for it future, whether conservative labor or liberal sensitivities can satisfy the progress (and horrors) of the 20th Century, women's pressing need to be more than mindless servants or children's hopes for their own identities-even when they conflict with a parents ideals-are possible. Walter is the key finger here, the outsider who is more understanding, able to see the trauma of family life and capable of loving it, he knows the world all too well, and serves as an agent of awareness for the closed minded Stanley, the dreamy Louise, the pained Clive and the blossoming Pamela.
Unlike his famous works, which have traces of Clive and his sexual awakenings (Alan in Equus and Amadeus in Amadeus), or Stanley's stagnant middle aged professional (Dysart in Equus), this piece is smaller in scope, but only if one considers "family life" to be anything but epic.