PHOTOS —
CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS
— THE CHARACTERS (SALIERI, MOZART, JOSEPH
II)
The following review appeared in the Croydon Advertiser on
22 December 2000:
Wilson's School, Wallington
Amadeus
Donald Madgwick
Wilson's School gave us a deeply absorbing production, the jewel in whose crown was the multi-layered interpretation of Salieri by Michael Englard. Shaffer's thesis, expressed by Salieri himself, is that from the ordinary Mozart created legends, while from legends Salieri created the ordinary. This canker gnawing at his heart was built up by Englard into a kind of symphony of self-disgust, overlaid with the elegance of a successful court composer who had Vienna at his feet.
A brilliant portrayal, then; though not quite so convincing in the scenes as the old man, bent double, who unfolds the tale with quavery voice and a plethora of stagy hand-tremblings.
Jeff Shaw's direction was measured, at times a little slow, but pellucid in the telling. The costumes were a joy to the eye, the settings simple but effective.
Adam Smit played Mozart in the spirit of a prankster, a Till Eulenspiegel let loose in a stuffy court. As his wife Constanze, Katharine Turner adopted the determined pose of a common, lusty wench, perhaps the ideal counterpart of the scatologically "obscene child" she has married.
The narrow stuffiness of the court was exemplified in Rory Thompson's supercilious director of the Imperial Opera, dismissing Mozart with icy disdain; and by Jonathan Eynon's pompous Prefect of the Imperial Library, with James Barbour's Groom of the Imperial Chamber. The Emperor himself was played by Tim Atkins with a careless lightness, amiably assenting to a flunkey's view that Mozart's Il Seraglio contained "too many notes".
And before I deliver too many words, let me pay a parting tribute to the Venticelli of David Clifford and Andrew Simpson, a glutinously cloying pair of rumourmongers.