Just kidding

Amadeus by Peter Shaffer is haunted by its own antecedents. Viewers are apt to feel that a new production lacks the beauties they’ve seen, or believe they’ve seen, in previous versions. Director Michael Longhurst opens with a fusion of time zones. The courtiers are attired in silk curtains like proper 18th-century toffs, while the musicians on stage wear the baggy subfusc of a contemporary orchestra. Electronic cries of ‘Salieri, Salieri’ are broadcast through a Tannoy as if the tardy Kapellmeister were being chivvied from his dressing-room by an irate stage hand.

Early on we get the famous ‘voice of an obscene child’ speech, which is perhaps the most sublime piece of English prose ever written on the subject of music. Here the magnificent rhetoric is marred by an overloud orchestra and by the imperfect diction of Lucian Msamati (Salieri). He emphasises the concluding lines with hand gestures as if he were beating time to his own thoughts.