Few dramatic works have been blessed with so successful and durable stage and film versions as Amadeus.  The movie was most respectfully curated and used the best of film techniques and peak musicians to produce a multiple Oscar winner that caught the imagination of the world. This production deviates not a scintilla from that flawless achievement.

The plot and the historical controversy that surround it are mightily well known. Mozart (Adam Gillen), about to enter his most golden period of composition, comes to the Vienna court of Emperor Joseph II. While turning out evermore sublime pieces like Il Seraglio, The Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro he serially alienates the court worthies (Kapellmeister, Prefect, Chamberlain and Opera Director) through showing intolerably bad manners and deliberately provocative themes. He both dazzles and enrages doyen court composer Antonio Salieri (Lucian Msamati) who determines to eliminate him.

If Salieri can’t be remembered as more than a mediocre composer then he will settle for the distinction of being Mozart’s murderer. (Despite a confession and botched suicide attempt, Salieri delivers on the legacy of dud music but fails badly in the ‘I Killed Mozart’ project.)

It is, of course, a terrible thing to recklessly accuse anyone of murder, though they lived back in the 18^th Century, if they didn’t, in fact, do it. Salieri was a real-life composer of some passing note. As for mediocrity, one is bound to say that there is always a lot of it around to be suffered through and is not a huge cause of homicide. Many PhD theses have been penned that examine the forensic issues. As Joseph II might say, “too many words” (rather than notes) for this review. Let’s just take it at face value.

Although the late author Peter Shaffer posits a highly believable human being as an unproven assassin, I find it useful to conceive of Salieri as a dramatic avatar who embodies all the evil forces that contributed to a glorious composer dying early, impoverished and alcoholic.

There are so many characters in Amadeus who have reason to at least despise the foul-mouthed, ill-bred, opinionated, scatological, sex-obsessed Mozart as he is portrayed. Merely writing superb music is no get-out-of-jail card for sorely offending cultured sensibilities. But Salieri, in the play, takes things a step further.

His self-destructive envy is such that he plans to make Mozart a sacrificial victim so as to ‘discipline’ God for directing his bolt of genius past Salieri’s head (thereby hitting Mozart by mistake). Mozart for sure has the day-to-day bravado but only Salieri possesses this staggering level of hubris. He is 20% composer and 80% intriguer; with a court spy system to make it all stick. Our crude young interloper was probably dead before he arrived.

So just how grotesque is Mozart throughout this most powerful production lasting close to three hours? Well, while the court fogies wear impressive wigs and satins, he skates in with a blond hair rinse, pink sloppy jackets and something resembling football boots. His wife Constanze (Karla Crome) is clad in a clunky ugly sister dress that confirms her as a clueless chav while her accent is unvarnished Cockney. The word punk is not totally out of place for the two of them. The court doesn’t do punk.

This production works immensely well because Director Michael Longhurst
and Designer Chloe Lamford have so artfully slipped these three key plot figures into a hummingly focused world of singers, movers, musicians and a sizeable orchestra that together create both a seething and oppressive court; one that produces its own creative tension for the leads to play against.

No expense has been spared within a generous performing space that breathes. It allows the actors and musicians to appear and disappear through the floor while cameras to roam into revealing high and low shots. These keep Mozart’s well-hidden tragedy constantly rolling downhill to the cliff edge. This is way more than being a filmed performance. It is a classy visual work in its own right. Furthermore, sound designer Paul Arditti delivers pitch perfect sound across some turbulent scenes in which even the musicians do some thunderous mass adulation scenes.

It does, I think, stand or fall on Salieri, the man who always knows how best to grease the bananas skins on which Mozart will slide to his sorry end. Msamati’s rendition of the character is not what one might have come to expect. Here the northern Italian ‘small town Catholic’ comes in the form a towering booming voiced British-Tanzanian black man with a presence not unlike Lenny Henry’s. (He does sotto voce too.)

His Salieri quick-wittedly wears many on-and-off hats. He seamlessly plays a grinning, winking Dutch uncle to the audience as if he were the compere in a local pantomime. He analyses and explains his own complex relationship with God and his belief that music alone proves the existence of the Almighty. He manipulates Mozart and the stodgy members of the court and wins out every time like a well-practised conman. He is as ‘in your face’ and ‘up your dress’ as Harvey Weinstein, playing a nauseating scene where he proposes trading favours with Constanze as she seeks lucrative court preferment for her cashless husband (“Mozart told me: be very careful with that one”).

Just as the animalistic Mozart can become godlike through his music, Salieri is capable of bestial schemes in the face of the Creator. The work is riddled with such telling ironies. 

Two great scenes stand out.  When Constanze hands Salieri her husband’s folder of compositions he is gobsmacked by their unerring clarity of thought and total absence of corrections. Alone later, beaten down and crawling around on the floor, he perceives the extent of Mozart’s genius; he curses a world that allows a man like him to reduce legendary themes to dull ordinariness while the ordinary and unimpressive Mozart creates themes that will become legends. In a tortured soliloquy we see professional adoration morph into a debased determination to annihilate the man he reluctantly idolises. It is gut-wrenching.

Later, when Mozart is racked with pain and penury while composing a funeral Mass we see Salieri trying to convince Mozart that he has poisoned the younger man. But so convincing has Salieri become Mozart will not accept the confession. The men cling together in a final awkward clutch where the victim is still hero-worshipping a perpetrator who will soon be putting him into his pauper’s grave. This is no trick of the light, it is hard-won theatrical creation of belief. While the Mozart portrayal may go too far into the area of untrammeled boorishness, the man beneath it is good and true. He is capable of seeing humanity in one whose musical talents are sparse in comparison.

The time goes fast, taking in this complex, visually stunning and riveting play. Great skill has gone into creating atmosphere and epic scenes in a piece that, at times, has a lightly cartoonish quality. I’m not sure how many more high-class freebies the National Theatre will send our way. Most of us saw the movie more than once. Let’s make sure we all absorb the NT’s version. It is one of the truly good things in life, at present.

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