“I enjoy acting, particularly when we are dealing with a subject as searching as, say, A Man for All Seasons or The Royal Hunt of the Sun. Playing Pizarro, in the latter, was very absorbing. He was quite an incredible man, and Shaffer’s words are like fine wine.”
– Robert Shaw

 

Shaffer’s Pizarro is a mess of a man; a rabidly ambitious seeker, who is unable to bear the thought of retirement or the threat of an ordinary demise, he begins his conquest at an age when most soldiers would have long settled down. Yet his journey in the play is not from poverty to wealth, nor from obscurity to importance, but from lovelessness to love. It’s the last thing he expected to find on his voyage, and it shakes the core of his being.
 

The actor immersed himself in Pizarro’s life before filming began, but resisted any temptation to let his own resultant admiration colour this ruthless character, whom the viewer must never be moved to love. Shaw gives a courageous and truthful performance, showing the conquistador’s conflict and escalating torment, the extremes of love and hate both passionately enacted.

And for all that his portrayal is so grandiose, there are small and sublime details as well, like the tension in his face that slackens when he speaks with Atahuallpa, and the involuntary movement of his hand to his chest as the garrote does its work; it lasts for only a moment, and in that moment Pizarro’s heart breaks.
 

Pizarro is a creature of contradictions, capable of both great clarity and tremendous blindness, and so it’s fitting that he bonds with the Sapa Inca over mutual ruthlessness and hatred, laughing freely together over the opponents they’ve slain and those they would kill, the priests they disdain and the dogma they despise. Yet through this kinship, Pizarro rises for a brief time above such considerations, and dares to seek a glimpse of whatever higher power might speak through Atahuallpa.

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When his “God” fails to rise again, Pizarro sees Atahuallpa for what he truly was – “what else is a God but what we know we can’t do without?” – and finally understands that he has killed the very ecstasy through which he tasted any real divinity that might exist.

What remains to him is an empty idol: not only the shell of his departed spiritual-son, but the wisp of smoke that rises from his own extinguished fire, the fire of his searching and longing. He is left alone with a fortune that lacks value, a conquest stripped of victory, and a death which fells both his foes and himself for, as Martin’s parting words indicate, the best part of Pizarro dies on that final morning.

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What’s perhaps most moving in the cynical, raging journey of Pizarro is that he comes to feel a love so strong it destroys him, and yet this adoration blossoms and then breaks him without ever being professed.

Shaw plays Pizarro with such restless vigour – suffused with an energy like the quivering of a taut string, his own hated mortality always shadowing him – that the limpid stillness he finds in Atahuallpa’s company reveals his heart without any need of words. But the ravages of his life are never far from him – the grinding poverty, the casual scorn, the mockery and dismissal that drive him not only to prove himself, but to exceed the exploits of every explorer before him – and in the end, Pizarro cannot be any more than what he is. And so the die is cast, and the tragedy inevitable.