Word: shaffer
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Amadeus. Was Mozart poisoned by a rival? Britain's Peter Shaffer draws a cunning eternal triangle with God at the apex, music in the air and Byzantine intrigue everywhere. There are sumptuous performances by Ian McKellen, Tim Curry, Jane Seymour and Nicholas Kepros...
This phase of Shaffer's career began with The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964). In that play, Atahuallpa, who is both emperor and god of the Incas, is executed by the order of Pizarro, the Spanish conquistador. The most desolating moment of the play comes when Pizarro, who has lost faith in the Christian God, hopes against hope that Atahuallpa will be resurrected before his eyes. He is not. In Equus (1973), a boy blinds horses because he believes them to be gods who have witnessed his sinful transgressions. He duels with a psychoanalyst. Decrying his own dried...
...Amadeus, Shaffer reworks these themes in a drama that is less dramatically arresting or emotionally compelling than the previous two plays. In a threadbare season, it nonetheless sheds the glow of Joseph's coat of many colors. This time Shaffer focuses on two contenders on the treacherous fields of artistic fame and glory. Both are composers. One is Antonio Salieri (Ian McKellen), a man who achieved phenomenal musical renown at the royal court of Vienna in the late 18th and early 19th centuries...
...claims to have poisoned Mozart years before. Beethoven reported this unsubstantiated charge in an entry of his conversation book of 1824. More pertinently, Salieri confesses to the envy that breeds malice when a mediocre talent meets a transcendent genius. In editing and reshaping his own text for Broadway, Shaffer makes jealousy a key factor in Salieri's persistent savaging of the hard-pressed Mozart in his attempts to secure court posts and paying pupils...
...must also be singled out for the feline subtlety of his portrayal of Emperor Joseph II, brother of Marie Antoinette. Here are the mean, mangling whims of absolute power expressed by a man with a tongue of silk and a tone-deaf brain. In some ways, he is Peter Shaffer's most exquisitely precise creation of the evening...