"I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he's writing about. I think, you just can't move them about, you know"
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Shaffer’s “endemic” is a provocation disguised as craft talk: he’s borrowing the language of ecology to shame the fantasy that stories are modular content you can ship anywhere, slap a new accent on, and call it universal. In his mouth, a play isn’t a neutral script; it’s an organism with a habitat. The “soil” isn’t just geography, it’s class texture, idiom, weather, guilt, institutional power - all the local pressures that shape what characters can plausibly desire and what a roomful of people will laugh at, fear, or forgive.
The subtext is defensive in a way that feels very 20th-century playwright: theatre as a stubbornly situated art, resisting both the prestige economy of “timeless masterpieces” and the commercial logic of exportability. Shaffer wrote big, portable hits (Amadeus, Equus) that traveled the world, so the line also reads as a warning from someone who’s watched translation and adaptation sand down sharp edges. He’s not saying a play can’t tour; he’s saying it shouldn’t pretend nothing changes when it does.
The casual “you know” matters. It’s rhetorical softening that masks a hard claim about authenticity and authority: the writer’s place grants a kind of ownership over meaning. In an era when global productions, revivals, and “reimaginings” are standard, Shaffer’s remark lands as both principled and slightly anxious - a reminder that cultural specificity is often the engine, not the obstacle, of resonance.
The subtext is defensive in a way that feels very 20th-century playwright: theatre as a stubbornly situated art, resisting both the prestige economy of “timeless masterpieces” and the commercial logic of exportability. Shaffer wrote big, portable hits (Amadeus, Equus) that traveled the world, so the line also reads as a warning from someone who’s watched translation and adaptation sand down sharp edges. He’s not saying a play can’t tour; he’s saying it shouldn’t pretend nothing changes when it does.
The casual “you know” matters. It’s rhetorical softening that masks a hard claim about authenticity and authority: the writer’s place grants a kind of ownership over meaning. In an era when global productions, revivals, and “reimaginings” are standard, Shaffer’s remark lands as both principled and slightly anxious - a reminder that cultural specificity is often the engine, not the obstacle, of resonance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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