Love & Passion Quote by Peter Shaffer

Shaffer is poking at theatre's unspoken rule: sex, especially satisfying sex, is dramaturgically inert unless it detonates into obsession, violence, or myth. The line is funny because it treats an outrageous act (blinding horses) as if it's the natural punctuation mark after a perfectly ordinary rite of passage. That deadpan escalation is the point. He’s not “shocking” for its own sake; he’s diagnosing what the stage rewards.

The subtext is a critique of narrative appetite. A young man has consensual, pleasurable sex with someone he desires, feels content, and... what then? Contentment doesn’t generate scenes; it closes them. Theatre runs on imbalance: shame, longing, taboo, spiritual hunger, the itch that won’t stop. Shaffer’s syntax does the work: the clause piles up normality (“immensely attractive,” “fully satisfied”) until it becomes a trap, forcing the punchline to land as an indictment of our demand for crisis.

Contextually, it’s hard not to hear the ghost of Equus in the room. Shaffer wrote a play where erotic awakening, religious awe, and cruelty collapse into a single, theatrical image. He’s admitting that the kind of charged, symbol-heavy extremity that made Equus possible isn’t an accident; it’s a structural pressure. The quote doubles as craft advice and self-satire: if you want the audience’s attention, don’t give them healthy sexuality and a tidy resolution. Give them a rupture that reads like destiny.