Adam Gillen's Mozart is like Rik Mayall with Tourette's in this Amadeus revival which puts the music centre-stage to show-stealing effect

Amadeus 

Olivier Stage, National Theatre                Until Feb 2                   2hrs 30mins

Rating: ***

Peter Hall’s original staging of Peter Shaffer’s would-be thriller about the bitter rivalry between court composer Salieri and the upstart young Mozart deliberately muted the music. Michael Longhurst’s lavish revival, 37 years on, has a very different emphasis.

While rather pointlessly staging it as a sort of play within a play, starting off with the actors warming up backstage pre-performance, he then puts the music centre-stage with some 20 young musicians from the Southbank Sinfonia. 

They are ever-present, sometimes helping with scene-changing but usually making music. To show-stealing effect.

This is most skin-tingling when Lucian Msamati’s Salieri, who may have been a second-rate composer but is a top-class critic, recalls the moment he recognised Mozart’s genius, when he heard his Adagio: ‘A single note of the oboe hung there unwavering, piercing me through.’ And so, thanks to a fabulously talented oboist, it does so all over again.

Musically, this production is note-perfect. But when the words take over, it becomes heavier-going. 

A sweaty, seething Msamati is very good at expressing his frustration with being merely mediocre, ‘distinguished by people incapable of distinguishing’, but never seems brutal enough to murder.

He may well only be a murderer in his own guilt-stricken imagination rather than for real, but there’s too little tension in this production between what we see and what Salieri describes.

Adam Gillen has the much tougher task of playing the scatological, rasping, raspberry-blowing Mozart. 

Peter Hall noted in his diaries that Mozart admired grace in everything, insisting that ‘his awfulness in the play must therefore be delicate’. Gillen’s Mozart is anything but. 

He’s Rik Mayall with Tourette’s and a hideously high-pitched giggle, scampering, squealing and squawking, with no element of sending himself up and without the essential winning personal charisma that would override one’s irritation.

This Mozart grates without breaking one’s heart. For this tricky play to work its tragic magic, he must do both.

Side Show 

Southwark Playhouse, London           Until December 3         2hrs 25mins 

Rating: ***

This is the story of conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton. Discovered in a Thirties freak show, they are glammed up into vaudeville stars by a New York talent scout and offered celebrity status when a Hollywood producer recognises their potential. 

But as what? Freaks or genuine stars? Together or apart?

It’s a true story, giving Bill Russell and Henry (Dreamgirls, opening soon in the West End) Krieger’s moving musical added punch. 

That the pair are joined at the hip is also a metaphor for everyone’s inner conflicts, divided by contradictory desires, wanting to share one’s highs and lows while needing one’s own space.

Daisy (fabulous Louise Dearman) is flirty, while Violet (Laura Pitt-Pulford, also fabulous) is a homebody.

The opening freak show is underwhelmingly weird with the twins held together by a mere stitch at the buttock rather than painfully bound at the hip.

Still, the devoted Jake (outstanding Jay Marsh), the Human Cannibal who acts as the girls’ minder, raises the temperature with The Devil You Know. 

His rendition of You Should Be Loved almost blows the roof off.

The plot thickens nicely when Violet falls in love with their choreographer, a cute Dominic Hodson, and the girls clock that being locked in an eternal duet rather cramps their style.

Once it gets going, Hannah Chissick’s production reveals all the emotional complexities and hits all the right notes.

The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide To Socialism And Capitalism With A Key To The Scriptures

Hampstead Theatre, London       Until November 26              3hrs 30mins 

Rating: ****

Tony Kushner’s latest play is what it says on the tin – and more. George Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide To Socialism And Capitalism gets a reference in the title and GBS gets a name check in the first scene, too.

The play is certainly Shavian in its ferocious intelligence, if not in its content, as a gay guy works out who he wants most, his expensive rent-boy lover or his theologian husband. 

But this big, bracing piece – from the author of the epic Angels In America, to be revived by the National next year – has more in common with the meaty dissections of dysfunctional families in the work of Arthur Miller, as decades of secrets and lies are exposed.

David Calder’s Gus, a retired longshoreman and communist, has announced that he wants to kill himself – because of his Alzheimer’s, he claims – and leave his money and his Brooklyn brownstone to his children.

These noisy Italian-Americans – and their various partners and exes – talk in overlapping dialogue, from which only the odd phrase or word can be extrapolated, never mind understood. 

No one listens to anyone, preferring to get their own fiercely held ideas off their chest. Only Gus’s sister Clio (Sara Kestelman), a sometime nun, Maoist and member of the Shining Path cult, remains a still, small voice of calm.

Tamsin Greig is outstanding as Empty (real name Maria Theresa), divorced but still sleeping with her ex and now married to Maeve, a doctor of theology who is expecting their child, fathered by Empty’s brother. Here, relationships are necessarily complicated.

In every sense, this is a heady brew, which director Michael Boyd and a fine cast deliver with gusto.

What Shadows 

Birmingham Rep Studio                Until November 12                 2hrs 45mins 

Rating: **

In making his notorious ‘Rivers of blood’ speech in 1968 against immigration in Birmingham, Enoch Powell, the Tory member for Wolverhampton South West, kiboshed his career and brought down the wrath of his own party on his massively educated head. 

But was his toxic speech – he rashly quoted a constituent who complained about ‘wide-grinning piccaninnies’ – a mere bid for fame? Or was Enoch a couple of b ourbons short of the full biscuit tin?

With What Shadows, I was rather hoping for something featuring Ted Heath in an almighty strop and gaskets being blown in the Sixties corridors of power. 

But that is not this play. The writer Chris Hannan – a white Scotsman – handles his subject with tongs and keeps the whole thing domestic. 

We see starchy Enoch and his smiley wife Pamela in a friendship with the editor of the local Wolverhampton paper (George Costigan) and his wife (the excellent Paula Wilcox). 

It’s a sensitive tale of picnics with the civilised Powells, of birds trilling, and of the foursome’s friendship being destroyed by that speech – symbolic of the divided national reaction.

Ian McDiarmid nails Powell’s halting voice and the submerged Brummie accent, and gives us a Latin-spouting scholar with a brain the size of the British empire (he was once its youngest professor).

But the action includes all sorts of fictional people you could do without – chiefly an angry black academic windbag (Rebecca Scroggs) who hunts him down as a dying man in the early Nineties. 

Then there’s a racist landlady, a chirpy Pakistani (an escaped stereotype from the sitcom Curry And Chips) and a gay Asian man.

It ends with an unrepentant Powell with Parkinson’s disease. But it leaves us with the unspoken thought that the immigration trickle that Enoch complained of is now a river.

In Brexit Britain, was he a true prophet or did he just make life more miserable for immigrant people who’d done him no harm?

Instead of giving us a drama rooted wholly in this divisive character, we get a good performance isolated in a windy, rhetorical evening that goes nowhere at length. A waste of a great subject.

Robert Gore-Langton

The Boys In The Band

Touring until November 19                                                                    2hrs 30mins 

Rating: ****

Everyone loves a party, playwrights in particular, ripe as they are for drunkenness, drama and confrontation. 

This ground-breaking gay play by Mart Crowley clearly inspired My Night With Reg and the straight campfest that is Abigail’s Party.

It premiered in 1968, a year before the Stonewall riots in New York kick-started the gay-rights movement and, remarkably, was the first mainstream play to depict a group of gay men interacting.

Although the first half of Adam Penford’s lively production has the gentle bitchery and barbs you’d expect at such a do, it’s not all laughs. 

Gathered in a smart Manhattan flat are a couple conflicted over monogamy, a camp queen and his black companion, the faithful friend of the host, a cowboy hustler and a straight interloper.

The guest of honour at this birthday soiree is Harold, a self-described ‘ugly, pock-marked fairy Jew’. Mark Gatiss’s understated performance – rather than resorting to bitchy stereotype – makes the play relevant.

The real villain of the evening is host Michael (a brittle, febrile Ian Hallard, Gatiss’s real-life husband), who initiates a revealing party game that highlights his own inadequacies as much as others’.

‘Show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse,’ he says, and the play’s final lines are a plea for less self-loathing (though the implication is society’s treatment of homosexuals is to blame).

It’s a period piece, and of its time, but the themes it throws up about love and friendship are timeless and universal.

Mark Cook

boysbandplay.com