Amadeus - Review from wow.ie
It can be risky: a theatre company chooses to stage a piece that has become familiar to audiences through another medium, that medium generally being that of film or television. Hoping that said familiarity will encourage bums to fix themselves onto seats, there is also the chance that such a decision will backfire, in that the very familiarity of the piece will breed contempt in an audience who have been happy to love the piece in its well-known form. Ouroboros (formerly Theatreworks) have taken such a chance on Peter Schaeffer's long-lived and famously filmed Amadeus; the result is that the discerning theatre-goer has new perspectives onto the themes of this story of mediocrity and genius.
But are those really the overriding themes? Hollywood types, seeking the least challenging common denominator, and outraged scholars sniffing at what they perceive to be fictional biography, have missed the point of the play on several levels. The story of Salieri (Denis Conway), well-placed in court only to be intellectually and in some ways spiritually displaced by the grotesque young genius, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Patrick Moy), can be read as 'thwarted hack conspires to destroy dazzling rival'. That's what got the academic critics in such a swivet. However, Schaeffer is playing with the kinds of themes that his characters did when composing opera, albeit less mythic, and more towards the archetypal— and that's what comes clear in this recent production.
In the giddy sweep and swirl of Milos Forman's multi-award winning film, there is much spectacle, but the ultimate loss of what can be seen to be a vital theme that underpins Amadeus: that of the dynamic of father and son, a dynamic that is not restricted to blood ties, nor to the corporeal plane. While Leopold Mozart is a physical presence in the movie, here he is as remote, distant, omniscient, and disapproving as Salieri's God. Mozart's fear of his father is as great as Salieri's initial reverence, turned into contempt, for his heavenly father figure, and Salieri further sets himself up as both father and manipulative god to Mozart's struggling artist. The subtleties are there, teased out by the players, and are exactly the kind of captured, controlled moments that make theatre such an important art form.
The Beckett Theatre is much underused: its height and width and depth allows for a sweep of staging that is not put to the kind of use it ought by Dublin's theatre community. Long a favourite of Theatreworks (now Ouroboros), Ferdia Murphy's set makes excellent use of the flies, the traps, and an upstage wall that is capable of revealing all manner of dramatic device.
One wishes that the music were given better amplification— although one also imagines that one would be complaining, under such circumstances, that the score drowned out the players, so we must accept that the suitable decisions were made.
