Arias of agony for Mozart’s enemy: PATRICK MARMION reviews Amadeus 

Amadeus (NT at Home, via YouTube)

Verdict: Music to my ears 

Rating:

Amadeus is an epic tale of glorious self-pity. Many will know it best from the Oscar-winning film starring F. Murray Abraham as Salieri — the Court Composer to Emperor Joseph II in 18th-century Vienna.

Salieri was supposedly toxic with envy of the effortless genius of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Even Mozart’s middle name was torture to him — it meant ‘loved by God’.

The film was based on Peter Shaffer’s play, which premiered at the National Theatre in 1979, starring Paul Scofield and Simon Callow as Salieri and Mozart.

This, though, is Michael Longhurst’s 2016 production, with Lucian Msamati and Adam Gillen playing the two leading roles.

As an account of the pair’s relationship, it’s free-flowing fiction, inspired by rumours that Salieri poisoned Mozart in a jealous rage.

There’s no evidence of any such chicanery, but Shaffer didn’t let the facts stand in the way of a good story. Nor does Longhurst’s production concern itself with anything so inconvenient as historical truth.

He has Salieri (Msamati) indulging in Krispy Kreme doughnuts and with an interesting cod-Italian accent.

But once you’ve suspended your disbelief, you see that Msamati is an inspired choice, bringing passion and vigour to the scheming Salieri’s arias of agony.

Gillen, meanwhile, has modelled his squeaky, needy, childlike Mozart on the manners of Johnny Rotten and the androgyny of David Bowie. He’s a potty-mouthed, poo-obsessed infant with a filthy libido.

Like a theatrical mosquito, I wanted to swat him at first. Yet by the end, after all of his squealing, mimicking and hammering of his harpsichord, I was moved by his plight as a pauper.

Whatever you make of the acting, Mozart’s music will blow you away. As Salieri says, when he composed it was like the voice of God pouring out of an obscene child.

Longhurst fully integrates the Southbank Sinfonia’s musicians into the gorgeously costumed and choreographed show, even having them roam the stage.

Alas, this is the last of NT at Home’s freebies. I hope a pay-to-view NT app may be on the way to replace them.

Horrible Histories: Barmy Britain (touring, birminghamstage.com)

Verdict: Loud and proud

Rating:

Good on Birmingham Stage Company for getting Terry Deary’s lucrative history franchise back on the road, literally, with a lowbrow tour of English car parks.

No one will ever accuse them of being too posh to perform, but I can’t help admiring their chutzpah. Tickets are sold per car, and the rock concert-type stage at the tour’s launch, in Henley-on-Thames, was a good 100 yards off.

To see, you have to watch a big screen over the stage, and to hear you have to tune in on your car radio.

Luckily, performers Neal Foster and Morgan Philpott are total strangers to nuance, and get stuck into their stock-in-trade cross-dressing, panto-style historical travesty like farmers shovelling silage. 

Are they keeping one metre (plus) apart? It’s hard to tell at this Hubble telescope-esque distance, but maybe they’d been locked down together.

The show starts with Boudica butchering Romans, and ends with Queen Victoria and Albert doing a rap: ‘She’s Vicky with a V, he’s Albert with an A, / Let’s hear you all shout hip hop hooray.’

We are urged to honk our car horns instead of clapping, so best not take your dog — ours is still in analysis, but doing well. 

Be assured there is no danger of edification. 

Spectators should merely expect to indulge in prurient disgust over Elizabethan methods of torture, and groan at the less-than-fragrant fart gags.

I’m not sure I’d want to see Chekhov done like this, but Tudor hats off to them for performing live, albeit to an audience trapped in cars — most of whom, I suspect, were just pathetically grateful to get out of the house. As was I.