One day in the early spring of 1965, with "The Royal Hunt of the Sun" happily established in the repertory of the National Theatre, I was asked by its masterly dramaturge Kenneth Tynan if I had a one-act play for the company to accompany Strindberg's "Miss Julie", which Maggie Smith and Albert Finney were proposing to act during the coming season at Chichester.  Without much conviction, but with the sort of energy which Tynan always elicited from me, I described my idea of a party given in a London flat, played in Chinese darkness--full light--because of a power failure in the building.  We would watch the guests behave in a situation of increasing chaos, but they would of course remain throughout quite unable to see one another.  Ever one to appreciate a theatrical idea, Tynan dragged me off instantly to see Laurence Olivier, the director of the National.  In vain did I protest that there really was no play, merely a convention, and that anyway I had to travel immediately to New York to write a film script.  Olivier simply looked through me with his own Chinese and unseeing eyes, said "It's all going to be thrilling!" and left the room.

 

In the event, it WAS thrilling, almost too much so.  The stories of rehearsing "Black Comedy" are legion and hilarious.  One day I shall set them down fully.  Suffice it here to quote Tynan on the whole experience: "This was farce rehearsed in farce conditions."  Due to difficulties of scheduling at Chichester, we were offered very little rehearsal time and had to open without even one public preview before the assembled critics of England, on the very same stage where the year before we had been able to present the Inca piece after ten weeks of preparation.  Despite this handicap, John Dexter directed the play with blazing precision, and it was acted with unmatchable brio by Smith and Finney, by Derek Jacobi as an incomparable Brindsley, and by Graham Crowden as a savagely lunatic Colonel Melkett.

 

In composing "Black Comedy", I encountered one serious problem.  The reversal of light and dark was not in itself a sufficiently sustaining idea to keep the play going for the required length.  In actuality, someone would, of course, produce a candle and end the situation.  What was needed was a reason for one of the people to KEEP the others in the dark.  From this necessity arose the actual plot:  the idea that the host [Brindsley] had borrowed all the furniture in the room from an antique-collecting neighbor [Harold, played by Finney] without telling him and that, on the unexpected appearance of this dangerous neighbor, the poor host had to return every scrap of it---chairs, tables, lamps, even a sofa---in the dark and unaided, before he could restore the light which would otherwise expose him as a thief.  The gods really blessed me with this solution.  The resultant sequence of furniture moving created some seven minutes of continuous laughter.  Indeed the first night turned into a veritable detonation of human glee.  A stern-looking middle-aged man sitting directly in front of me suddenly fell out of his seat into the aisle during this section of the play and began calling out to the actors in a voice weak from laughing, "Oh stop it!  Please, stop it!!"  I cannot remember a more pleasing thing ever happening to me inside a theater....by Peter Shaffer...from an 1982 introduction to an early  book of his plays  which included (up until that time) "Black Comedy", "Royal Hunt of the Sun", "Equus" and "Amadeus"...