AMADEUS (National Theatre at Home)*****

 

By Aashiq

Link: https://www.ntathome.com/amadeus £6.66, £8.32 for a month’s subscription to watch all the plays or £83.32 for a year’s subscription

Available until: If you rent it, you can access it for 3 days. If you subscribe, I think you can watch it as many times as you like till they take it down. They add new plays every month so they might be taking them away too.

Yes, I know I already saw it when it was streamed on youtube. But I love it, okay? So I’m watching it again. It’s a really well-written play about my favourite composer (and it’s basically my dream role, I’d say I spend a very large proportion of my life acting like a child and playing the piano) and I don’t think there’s any play in existence with a better soundtrack.

The composer Antonio Salieri is coming to the end of his life. He looks back on his career as a composer and his encounters with a young composer named Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, better known as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (though he used many variants of his name and the one he used most often was Wolfgang Amadè Mozart).

Mozart has been dead for over thirty years so Salieri really ought to have stopped stressing. If Mozart was going to come back from the dead and compose more music that’s better than Salieri’s, I really think he’d have done it by now. But to Salieri, Mozart has become an obsession and it’s not like an obsession with something material like handbags, where you can keep on buying them. You can’t possess a person. Or their talent. You also can’t make them go away. Or… not usually.

In their first meeting, Mozart (who is the most awful little show-off, he’s nearly as bad as me) gives Salieri a demonstration of his remarkable musical memory and his abilities as a composer. As his career progresses, Salieri attends Mozart’s performances and realises how annoyingly good he is. And all the way through the play, one question hangs in the air, asked by Salieri at the start of the play and then hinted at as the play progresses. Did he kill Mozart?

This production gives importance to every part of the story. Every character is allowed to be a human (even the Venticelli, who have the function of moving the plot along, are recreated as musicians, with their gossiping nature emphasised). There seems to be no attempt to push the audience in a particular direction as far as sympathies go. There has also been great care taken with the musical aspects of the story: it isn’t rushed at all, it’s simply allowed to be beautiful and Michael Longhurst’s direction is as true to the sections of opera within the play as to the play itself.

Chloe Lamford’s designs are incredible and beautiful. The stage changes shape throughout the play – it grows and shrinks and sometimes there’s a big hole in the middle for the orchestra – but it’s always unobtrusive. At least, I never saw it happen. This is partly because the performances are so strong, but the cleverness of the set designs, its ability to be moved around without affecting the story or causing noise or obstruction or distraction, must play a huge part too.

The cast are truly fantastic – and wonderfully diverse, which is so good to see. I don’t personally feel there’s always a racist intent when people say they like plays to be ethnically true to the time. It’s quite annoying because they’re basically saying I can’t play Mozart or do Shakespeare, but I also think it’s a good thing if people are watching plays or films and asking why all the characters are white and being told that in the time the work was set, they would all have been white. There are very obvious disadvantages to productions like that, but the questions start important conversations and we don’t want anyone to think diverse productions are an accurate representation of the way the world was then. We want people to know the truth.

But when you see a production like this, when everyone is so diverse and also so completely right for their parts, I think that’s really important too. The roles have been given to actors who can tell the story absolutely wonderfully with intelligence and talent and insight and empathy and everything a great actor needs. It could also provide inspiration to current actors who are struggling and to future actors who might not have believed in themselves otherwise… and what else matters? How could a play ever be better than that?

Lucian Msamati is incredible as Salieri. He does terrible things, he manipulates and hurts others and he might have killed someone, but Lucian portrays the pain Salieri is in, the absolute all-consuming desperation, fear and inadequacy he feels in the face of Mozart’s talent and it’s impossible to hate him. In some ways, the play is more his tragedy because… but I’m not saying one word more. I don’t want to do spoilers and I’m sure you can work it out for yourself.

Adam Gillen is a childlike and endearing Mozart. He’s also obscene, unruly and it’s fair to say he crosses a few social boundaries, in an entirely innocent way. He’s selfish and self-obsessed, yet also very generous and loving. It’s a fabulous portrayal of a fascinating character.

Karla Crome is very loveable as his wife Constanze. She’s far from perfect and rather indiscreet, but that’s probably part of the reason why she understands and appreciates Mozart. Although it’s a sad and serious play, there is also a lot of comedy and Adam and Karla are on point.

We don’t really get inside the heads of the other characters in the same way, but there are some brilliant moments from Tom Edden (Joseph II), Alexandra Mathie (Count Johann Kilian Von Strack), Hugh Sachs (Count Franz Orsini-Rosenberg) and Geoffrey Beevers (Baron Gottfried Van Swieten), reacting to a new young composer who is unlike anyone they’ve met before.

The play also has actual opera singers playing opera singers, including Wendy Dawn Thompson as Salieri’s wife Teresa (I’ve sung with her. Just boasting. She was a soloist, I was chorus) and Eamonn Mulhall, who smashed it when I saw him as an ENO understudy, actually in the same work I performed in with Wendy. The singers are all excellent and it seems only fair and right that Mozart’s music should be performed by experienced professionals who have performed with some of the best companies and can show the audience – some of whom might never have seen an opera before – what an amazing experience it is to watch a really good opera.

It’s also an amazing experience to watch a really good play. And this one definitely qualifies.