Sir Peter Shaffer Memorial - National Theatre

This was a lovely tribute, in which Shaffer came across as a lovely man, let alone a leading playwright. For someone who clearly was working right until the end on pushing boundaries and progressing further, what was great was that this tribute paid tribute not just to when he pushed the envelope, but to how, and why, with each new play. To have simply staggered from Equus to Amadeus with scenes and sections would have been to show him as an inventive playwright, but it wouldn’t have shown him as him; by focusing on him as a character and collaborator and creator, this painted him as a pioneer and a person instead. Hell, how wonderful to focus even on the flops – how lovely that it wasn’t just one-sided, that masterpieces were written but mistakes too were made, and that juvenilia seemed as important as the masterworks.

And to quote lovely Pennington quoting lovely Shaffer, “Oh, the actors!” Even if we didn’t get to hear F Murray Abraham do that scene or Michael Gambon pretend to be a 20-something Spaniard, how moving – and how telling – to see titans like that giving their thanks. He clearly was instrumental in vitalising a number of careers (a point Daniel Radcliffe made very heartfelt-ly, I thought), and it felt like a very personal repaying of many favours. All the little vignettes had the competence and quality of proper performances, not one-offs – was particularly struck by the power and vindictiveness Jacobi bought, in five minutes of monologuing out-doing most of his recent cosy work. And oh, seeing Maggie Smith all but recreate her Kenneth Williams days – bliss! A delight, too, for the completely random musical interludes (and Sondheim, what an anecdote!) – all giving a fuller picture of the peerson, all making the afternoon even more nice. This account is rather wonderful in summing it all up - bookanista.com/peter-shaffer/.

Within Callow's show, I felt there was an argument underneath that Shaffer may lack the immediate name-recognition of his contemporaries, but that's solely because his voice kept developing, his style kept changing, his every new play was a brand new idea. It seemed what Callow wanted to do was not just pay tribute, but make the argument that where “Pinteresque” means – to – pause – a – lot, and “Stoppardian” means “too clever by half”, “Shafferian” may not have entered the lexicon, because how do we get from blinding horses to black comedies via Amadeus and the Andes? If such a term ought to exist, it ought to mean “unpredictable, apart from predictably doing something different”; Shafferian is adventurousness, it’s curiosity, and it’s character. Kudos to Callow, this tribute was ideally Shafferian. Not that I know Shaffer’s work all too well, but I felt Shaffer would have been chuffed to be commemorated not by a stuffy series of scenes, but by this witty biographical ribbing. In fact, one of the greatest compliments I can pay this is that, despite the glitziest of casts, it didn’t feel like it was aimed at me – a near-stranger to Shaffer with only a passing acquaintance to some of his works. It didn't want to explore the work, it wanted to explore the man. It felt aimed at the family, the friends, those familiar to these words – and the fact that it then worked for me was mere testament to how well he wrote. A great tribute to a clearly great man.

Now bring on the Tchaikovsky play!