God's Disputed Mouthpiece
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Theatre Review by Christina Manolescu</MARQUEE>
Beginning with Pushkin’s original theatre piece, ‘Mozart and Salieri,’ then Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera of the same name, later more grandly dramatized by Peter Shaffer’s ‘Amadeus,’ followed by Milos Forman’s Academy-award winning film adaptation, the legend of these two epic rivals grows greater and louder with each new production, exerting a timeless fascination on us all.
Within this staged blackness of a Universe, studded with rising, falling and imploding ‘stars,’ what we witness in ‘Amadeus’ is a sublime artistic liberty-taking with recorded historic facts in the service of theatrical impact and effect.
‘Amadeus’ debuts in the style of a churchly ritual, a hushed and potent darkness alive with whispers and rumours, perfumed with incense and twinkling with gilded chandeliers. We are told that, as a youth, Salieri forged a unilateral pact with some inscrutable divinity in exchange for the coveted gift of musical genius and fame. Supposedly in time, this morphed into his Machiavellian mission (while masking his genteel Mafioso-soul) to undermine and wipe out whatever competition might threaten his achieved stellar position in Vienna as 18th-century Court Composer and celebrated musician extraordinaire.
Often hilarious, often outrageous, the dramatic centre of gravity is indisputably the character and role of Salieri, stylishly and soberly performed by actor-musician Jean Marchand. It is through the obsessive lens of Salieri’s paranoia that we can feel—and share—his scorn and envy, grudging admiration and vengeful despair. His upstart rival, the unabashedly vulgar and sublimely gifted Amadeus Mozart, is interpreted by Damien Atkins with unrepressed gusto and flair..
Yannik Larivée’s swift, fluid and surreally-changing set design bedazzles with its astonishing and powerfully moving effects. James Lavoie’s costume design is both lavish and quirky, with an air of burlesque and also for Mozart, sometimes, with the air of the buffoon. The unfolding plot is punctuated and illuminated—at key moments—by the contrasting music of Mozart and of Salieri. Thus, it steadily and subtly connects the fictive dots between the interlinked composers’ lives and art.
Shaffer’s theatre-script is rich, intelligent, poetic and lyrical. In this dark, enthralling, ‘extreme-edgy’ staging by Moscow director, Alexandre Marine, Atkins’s Mozart is a comic, compulsive ‘manic’ presence, at times servile and effusive, at times arrogant and blundering, a clowning hyperactive adolescent—without the benefit of Ritalin—on a ceaseless endless ‘high.’ His wife, Constanza, portrayed by Brigitte Pogonat, gives a sympathetic and engaging performance as one who inevitably leaves behind the ‘age of innocence,’ given the extreme adversity of her alliance with this complex and troubled genius.
If, in this twisted legend, Mozart is Salieri’s caricature-creation, he also becomes Mozart’s destruction. His truly pious ‘divine pact’ degenerates over time into a Faustian trap. In the futile desire to rival Mozart’s talent, he gradually succeeds only in emulating Mozart’s dissolute, darker side. Yet Salieri remains moral enough to recognize, with apprehension, his own immorality. Although the play chronicles his tireless occult efforts to undermine his rival at every stage and on all fronts, his final grand ‘stage confession’ comes across more as a dramatic projection of his own hallucinatory guilt. Unwittingly and unwillingly from the start, both characters are interlinked in a tragic tug-of-war between Super-Egos. At the same time, they embody the gravitational tension between what each truly is and what each desperately aspires to be. In this not-to-be-missed production of the grand cosmic struggle, only one of them is allowed to survive.