Mozart’s magic, even in his pink Doc Martens
MOZART, ravaged by poison and madness, sprawls on the floor of his Vienna home. Behind him stands an orchestra playing the Requiem Mass he was writing at the time of his 1791 death. As the life ebbs out of him, the music builds in volume and potency. That is the scorching scene near the end of this week’s big opening — an interesting yet frustrating revival of Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play Amadeus.
This fictionalised account of Mozart’s career in the Austrian capital pits the prodigiously talented Mozart against the imperial court’s favourite composer, Antonio Salieri.
Envy gnaws at Salieri’s decency and he decides to destroy Mozart, but in the process realises that nothing will kill the young composer’s artistic brilliance.
Although Shaffer’s play is searingly truthful, it always takes a while to get going. The opening monologue by the aged Salieri is a swine. The vastness of the National’s Olivier stage swallows the moment.
Lucian Msamati is an actor of many talents, but I fear he is miscast in this leading role. His patchy Italian accent lends a pleasing riff to the name ‘Mozarrrrt’, but the thickness of his voice and physique seem wrong for such a sinuous politician.
The part of Mozart is invariably a problem. Shaffer accentuates the genius’s childishness — his scatalogical sex banter with his wife (Karla Crome) and his raspberry-blowing at dignitaries.
We are never meant to like the composer, but here the dysfunctionality is overdone. Adam Gillen gives Mozart a whinneying laugh, but it soon grates. Nor is he helped by his pink Doc Martens and bleached hair. The eccentricity could be reined in by at least 20 per cent.
The second half is better than the first. Salieri rages at God for not giving him Mozart’s talents.
Even while he is plotting Mozart’s downfall he has to accept, through choking despair, that the ‘sniggering, conceited’ Wolfgang Amadeus is, as his second name suggests, blessed.
Salieri casts a frantic eye at a Mozart score and the orchestra plays a snatch of the music. The moment he casts it aside, the orchestra stops. It is impossible not to applaud the broad sweep of Michael Longhurst’s direction and some of the support acting — Alexandra Mathie, Hugh Sachs and Geoffrey Beevers as grandees, Tom Edden as Emperor Joseph, with six fine singers.
Some of Mr Longhurst’s details are less persuasive. The two narrators become irritants. A violinist lies on her back to play. A xylophone is carried across the stage by technicians while its player plops out a tune.
You can’t argue with that wonderful Requiem, though.