Amadeus

Amadeus is narrated by a court composer who has spent his life being competent and devout, and who cannot forgive God for handing genius to a vulgar, giggling young man from the provinces. Salieri tells the story as a confession, and he is not a reliable witness.

Mozart arrives at court with terrible manners and impossible facility. Salieri, who recognises the music for what it is long before anyone else does, sets about frustrating a career he could never equal, while continuing to hear in every new score exactly what he himself will never write. The account of that destruction is Salieri's own, offered near the end of his life.

Peter Shaffer wrote the play, first staged in 1979; it took the Tony Award for Best Play and was later adapted for the screen. It is a fiction rather than a biography — the historical Salieri and Mozart were not what the play makes of them — and it admits as much, using an old rumour as a way into a question about talent and merit.

The subject is mediocrity as a form of suffering: what it is to be good enough to recognise greatness and not to possess it. The comedy is broad, the cruelty is quiet, and the music does an unusual amount of the dramatic work, because the audience hears what Salieri hears.

It suits audiences who want a large, articulate play with a monster at the centre of it. It works best live, where a man addressing the room directly for an entire evening only works if the room is actually there.