Before Miloš Forman’s Amadeus came Peter Shaffer’s theatrical take on Mozart and Salieri, staged in 1979 at London’s National Theatre. James Inverne lifts the curtain...
Peter Shaffer’s Mozartian murder play Amadeus, the latest from one of the West End’s most dependable hitmakers, was arguably the London theatre event of 1979. But its early off-stage shenanigans rather echoed the manipulations of a Mozart opera, with celebrated but capricious director John Dexter the abusive Count Almaviva (Marriage of Figaro), perhaps, and Shaffer the seemingly supine Countess. Reportedly buttoned-up and nervous in Dexter’s presence, bubbling with frustration away from it, all one needs to know about the relationship of playwright and director can be deliciously gleaned from Dexter’s published annotations on then-National Theatre director Peter Hall’s own published diary entries concerning Amadeus: ‘28th March 1979Shaffer: “I would never hold a pistol to John’s head. At the moment I would use a pistol to blow his head off. But I wouldn’t hold it to his head.” Dexter: “TOO COWARDLY AND AFRAID OF A KICK IN THE BALLS.”’
It’s not quite what one expects from the making of an elegant, classically structured play, shot through with intrigue and moral disintegration – or perhaps it is. Dexter’s demand that he should have a box office percentage even of other people’s future stagings finally proved too much for Shaffer. Breaking with his tormentor, he gave the play instead to Hall, for the National Theatre’s Olivier Theatre. Despite his diarised reluctance to take it on over Dexter (Dexter: ‘PILATE YOU’RE JESTING’), Hall viewed the show as one of his great achievements, not only delivering the first production starring Simon Callow, Felicity Kendal and Paul Scofield – and later casts such as Ian McKellen, Tim Curry, Mark Hamill and Jane Seymour – but a new production in 1998 at the Old Vic and on Broadway with Michael Sheen and David Suchet.
In fact, the first time, as a young journalist, I ever met Hall, he was in the middle of recasting that Old Vic production (the lady at the stage door asked if I was ‘ready for the audition’ – I was briefly tempted). Both that day during our interview, and in subsequent meetings, Hall was always in his happy place discussing Amadeus. ‘The thing with it is,’ he told me once, ‘you cannot put too much of Mozart’s music into the production, otherwise it will unbalance the play.’
Simon Callow, who created the role of Mozart, agrees about the music, but for him,
