Blood Feud

By T.E. Kalem

AMADEUS by Peter Shaffer

The death of God, the need for God, the rage against God if he does exist have obsessed Britain's Peter Shaffer for more than a decade. He has written three psychodramas that are, in a way that no author of an adulterous farce could imagine, plays about the eternal triangle. Two men are pitted against each other under the baleful or indifferent eye of a God who is present but never made manifest.

This phase of Shaffer's career began with The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964). In that play, Atahuallpa, who is both emperor and god of the Incas, is executed by the order of Pizarro, the Spanish conquistador. The most desolating moment of the play comes when Pizarro, who has lost faith in the Christian God, hopes against hope that Atahuallpa will be resurrected before his eyes. He is not. In Equus (1973), a boy blinds horses because he believes them to be gods who have witnessed his sinful transgressions. He duels with a psychoanalyst. Decrying his own dried-up rationality, the analyst envies the boy his pagan faith and passion. Sharing D.H. Lawrence's ideality of the "blood consciousness," Shaffer seems to agree with Freud that man's discontents are the high price of civilization.

In Amadeus, Shaffer reworks these themes in a drama that is less dramatically arresting or emotionally compelling than the previous two plays. In a threadbare season, it nonetheless sheds the glow of Joseph's coat of many colors. This time Shaffer focuses on two contenders on the treacherous fields of artistic fame and glory. Both are composers. One is Antonio Salieri (Ian McKellen), a man who achieved phenomenal musical renown at the royal court of Vienna in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The other is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tim Curry), who may be called a man or an immortal. We first meet Salieri on the day of his attempted suicide, when, with a twisted senile smirk, he begs the audience for absolution.

Why? He claims to have poisoned Mozart years before. Beethoven reported this unsubstantiated charge in an entry of his conversation book of 1824. More pertinently, Salieri confesses to the envy that breeds malice when a mediocre talent meets a transcendent genius. In editing and reshaping his own text for Broadway, Shaffer makes jealousy a key factor in Salieri's persistent savaging of the hard-pressed Mozart in his attempts to secure court posts and paying pupils.

At this and other points -- including a new scene concerning the premiere of The Magic Flute, which Salieri tried to thwart -- the New York production is at variance, not always wisely, with the original production at London's National Theater.

The story proceeds in flashback us ing Salieri as narrator. The device impedes the dynamics of the play and some times makes the Viennese court seem like a cynically corrupted version of Grover's Corners. Early on, when Salieri is 16, he kneels in prayer and makes a Faustian compact with God. He vows to excel in virtue, magnify his talents and live his life as a tribute to his creator if only God will grant him fame.

Imagine his personal fear and his ire at God when Mozart, "the obscene boy," appears with the music of heaven, sublimely, effortlessly at his fingertips. And what a Mozart! Impudent, abrasively egocentric, silly in behavior, foul of mouth, a wine-bibbing libertine. Tim Curry's Mozart is unforgettable, an imp of the perverse, a strangely vulnerable Pan on a goatish night out.

As Salieri, Ian McKellen is less secure than Paul Scofield, who played this role in London. He lacks Scofield's ability to make a syllable wince or engorge a phrase with acrid humor. More important, McKellen does not make Salieri's early vows of purity plausible. Thus his desired revenge against both God and Mozart verges on lago's malign spirit. No cast under Peter Hall's direction ever fails to glisten with finesse, force and impeccable timing. Jane Seymour plays Mozart's wife Constanze warmly and fetchingly. Nicholas Kepros must also be singled out for the feline subtlety of his portrayal of Emperor Joseph II, brother of Marie Antoinette. Here are the mean, mangling whims of absolute power expressed by a man with a tongue of silk and a tone-deaf brain. In some ways, he is Peter Shaffer's most exquisitely precise creation of the evening.

-- By T.E. Kalem

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