Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Friday Review | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

The symphony of a script

Despite its length, Boardwalkers' "Amadeus" was marked by flair, energy and a sense of purpose

PHOTO: S.R.Raghunathan

DRAMATIC POWER From "Amadeus"

It was an insanely ambitious project. When Boardwalkers director Michael Muthu decided to stage "Amadeus" as a part of The Hindu MetroPlus Theatre Festival, there were doubts about whether he could pull it off. The sheer length of the play, the dramatic extended monologues, the historical setting, the complex psychological relationships and the subtle ideation that marks one of the finest modern plays written for English theatre, had raised the doubt: could Muthu have bitten off more than he could chew?

The answer lay, at the end of a play that ran for almost three whole hours, in the attention with which the audience watched the show and the warmth of the applause that greeted the curtain call.

Shaffer's remarkable play may be named after Mozart but it revolves around Salieri, acutely aware of his failings as a court composer and of his young rival's supreme gifts.

The script explores the suffering of the two men, one a victim of his mediocrity and the other, who is wounded by his own genius. On the surface, the two men could not be different. Salieri, proud, sophisticated, devout and monogamous, and Mozart bumbling, earthy, profane and profligate. At another level, the two are twinned, their lives fused by their passion for music, their ambition, their pain and their headlong rush into ruin.

As Salieri, Muthu slid between the detachment that was necessary when he was narrating the story, and the frenzied emotion that characterised a man eaten up by envy. It is a jealousy fired by incomprehension about how God could have invested such genius in a bumbling and arrogant boor and Muthu did a creditable job in portraying the complexity in his relationship with Mozart — at once admiring and resentful, friendly and hostile, sympathetic and totally inconsiderate.

Arun Balachander created a memorable Mozart, a performance marked by high-pitched giggles and the hyperactivity of a child-man with a love for toilet humour and idiotic rhymes ("Stanzerly wanzerly piggly poo"). The idea that perfection can exist side by side with the dross was apparent every time he sat down at the piano, closed his eyes and ecstatically lost himself in the music.

The third side of the triangle, Anuradha Ananth as Constanze Webber, took time to warm to her role. She was less credible as the flirtatious and juvenile girl in the early scenes (who tempts Mozart with her `squeak squeak' in the cat-and-mouse game) than as the more mature and suffering wife, whose innocence and easy confidence is eroded by her marriage to Mozart and the machinations of Salieri. Her final scene, with a dying Mozart cradled in her arms, was full of sweet and despairing pathos and possibly the most moving scene in the entire play.

Bursts of energy

The scene changes, which demanded characters moving the furniture about as the action took place in the foreground, worked fairly smoothly and the play retained an energy despite its length.

One wished there was a greater multi-dimensionality in terms of expression. At times, Salieri seemed locked in a perpetual grimace and Mozart, bestowed with an everlasting pout. In the case of the lovably superficial Emperor Joseph II, there was a case for unidimensionality, but the element of caricature also marked the Venticelli gossips (Sarvesh Sridhar and Amit Singh). While they brought bursts of energy to the stage, helping tremendously with the static parts of the production, they seemed constantly plagued by pop-eyed expressions and stiff necks.

Some of the supporting cast, to put it mildly, were far from extraordinary. An exception was Suzanne, who played the diva Cavalieri with flamboyance, managing to inject character into a non-speaking role in what is after all a dialogue-driven play. But in a production of this kind, the minor weaknesses — of which there were a few — were put out of your mind by the central performances and the dramatic power of what is a symphony of a script.

SHONALI MUTHALALY

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail