Forsaking the “Mere”: Embodying the Art of Impassioned Performance/s in Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage

Abstract

Aims: A playwright’s acquirement of a talent for the uniqueness of stagecraft is a potential acknowledgement that can be accorded to Peter Shaffer. His acumen to perceive vibrant life stories that are conveyed in the most suitable artistic expression is most felicitous in the way that we have come to appreciate Peter Shaffer as a playwright.

Methodology and Approaches: The play Lettice and Lovage focuses on a compelling tale of a burgeoning camaraderie between Lettice and Lotte, a story about how two women cross each other’s paths and are overawed in their ability to see the banality of human existence caught in the wrangles of prosaic colloquiality of their surroundings.

Outcome: Lettice and Lotte, though binated in their obvious professional appearance, are seen as characters who eventually want to alter strictures of established discourse that prey upon the possibilities of human intellect. The need to renounce the claptrap of “mediocrity” and the horrors of the “sameness” of human imagination is what the play seriously contests.

Conclusion and Suggestions: The play’s projections of the stage are a symbolic return to the unceasing phantasm of theatre, to have sustained human imagination since times immemorial. The paper dwells on this intellectual enquiry of how the play awakens its audience from the long silent stupor of a perpetual intellectual stasis that has eschewed human capacities as “beings” who can rightfully exist in the vibrancy of an ever-creative and flourishing experience of life, but are often overwhelmed by the insinuating hold of “mediocrity” making the creative imagination compellingly ordinary.