Tiny Alice in Inca Land

The Royal Hunt of the Sun, by Peter Shaffer. A huge heraldic signet bearing a black cross is pinned with ascetic severity to the rear wall of the stage. Suddenly, it begins to open like secret paneling. Triangular sections peel back, and tongues of gold lick the surrounding dark. In the center of the blazing disk, like a jeweled idol released from a total eclipse, stands the sun god, the Inca, immutable, glorious, incandescent. In another scene, bitter light stipples the Spanish soldiers' helmets and swords as they pantomime their nail-clawing ascent of the Andes, and the men seem wearily stitched into their grey-hued armor as if they had enlisted for eternity. Spookily, stylized Peruvian masks glare, peer and revolve in ritual chorus like puzzled primordial birds. Royal Hunt dazzles the eye as a spectacle.

As a dramatic chronicle of the encounter of the aging conquistador Francisco Pizarro and the young Inca emperor Atahuallpa, however, the play is mechanical, preachy, largely unaffecting and sometimes silly. Ancient Mariner style, Shaffer supplies his own albatross in the form of a narrator, always an ill omen that the drama will be becalmed. He harangues the listener on the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church and the evils of war and plunder. His ultimate theme is that God is dead and life lacks meaning. Royal Hunt is a sort of Tiny Alice shorn of obscurantism and sent to Inca land.

Shaffer's Pizarro is a 20th century existentialist in the body of a 16th century swineherd. Born a bastard, he is too poor to count as human in the society of Spain. At 59, he scorns any ideal of military chivalry he once held. Love is a mockery and faith a nagging memory of trust betrayed. Even the gold is "only a metal" to him, but he pursues it as Ahab pursued the white whale. Just as Ahab was obsessed with the mystery of existence, Pizarro is haunted by the emptiness of being. Both are horrified by the blank, impersonal face that the universe turns to them. Played with stormy authority by Actor Christopher Plummer, Pizarro lashes his men through an ordeal of fire, ice and fear into the serene court of Atahuallpa. They are greeted as gods, and prove the bloodiest of devils. In a slow-motion ballet of contained fury, the actors mime the slaughter of 3,000 Peruvians within an hour by 167 Spaniards.

A subtler conflict enmeshes Pizarro and Atahuallpa. The existential hero of nothingness encounters the Rousseauistic myth of the innocent child of nature, the noblest savage of them all. David Carradine plays the Inca with marmoreal stoicism, and Shaffer gives him a primitive sign-and-grunt language that sometimes reduces the son of the sun to the son of Tondeleyo. The cynic in Pizarro becomes enthralled by the savior in Atahuallpa, who has a shining conviction that his godhead will raise him from the dead. Pizarro dreads but courts the great Inca's murder. If Atahuallpa is resurrected, might not Christ have been? Through the night, the old conquistador keeps watch over the slain god's body with desperate hope. When the Inca fails to stir, Pizarro lets out a strangled cry of "Cheat" over the corpse as if he had choked down a hemlock potion of love and loss.

One doubt that pervades the playgoer is whether the real Pizarro suffered any such metaphysical anguish. There is no proof that he did. A deeper doubt is raised by the playwright's view of all life as a bleak cheat. Most men have stronger human ties than Shaffer's hero, and they take life on faith, with an acceptance of what is good, bad and mortal about it. The flamboyant staging of Royal Hunt widens the spectator's eye, but the confrontation of two heroes and two civilizations compels neither cheers nor tears.

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