Trying to overshadow genius

Amadeus premiered in London in 1979, on Broadway in 1981 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film in 1984. It has now been brought to Taipei by the Godot Theater Company (果陀劇場), the second Peter Shaffer play that the company has staged this year.

According to producer Serina Chen (陳琪), Amadeus is one of the most ambitious stage plays to be put on in Taiwan. This is only partly due to the technical demands of the stage design that requires 10 completely different sets, but also the demands placed on the actors, primarily in the parts of Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri.

Amadeus tells the story of the arrival of the young prodigy, Mozart, at the court of Vienna where the court composer is the diligent, courtly Antonio Salieri. Mozart has few social skills and soon rubs many courtiers the wrong way, in particular Salieri, the only person who nonetheless appreciates Mozart genius. Salieri sets out to destroy his rival, but in doing so, in the face of Mozart's towering genius, his mind is thrown off balance even as he succeeds in his designs.

Shaffer described the play as "a fantasia based on fact," and the play is really about the destructive power of jealousy, not a dramatic biography. "The play is not about the 18th century, it is really about human desires," said director Chiang Wei-kuo (蔣維國). For this reason, as far as stage design and costume are concerned, the production has gone for a more general feel of the period rather than striving for historical accuracy.

On the technical front, Wang Shih-hsin's (王世信) stage has achieved considerable flexibility with a minimum of resources. "We did not want to follow Broadway in which the stage goes through massive transformations to create the scene," Wang said.

The same kind of conceptual approach was adopted with the costumes, which achieve a courtly richness, but remain true to modern ideas of design. This works surprisingly well without creating the kind of violent incongruity that one gets in many "updated" works.

The crunch comes in the acting. Shaffer's script walks a very fine line between melodrama and tragi-comedy, and poses an enormous challenge on any actor playing either of the two main roles. Unfortunately, Wang Po-sen (王柏森), who has made his name in musicals, does not possess the depth of dramatic experience to present the frighteningly complex personality of Mozart, who flits between buffoon and tormented genius.

The comic conventions of the Chinese theater, with the broad outlines and ostentatious showmanship, are ill suited to the portrayal of Shaffer's Mozart. Wang struggles valiantly with his part, making up in energy what he lacks in expressiveness, but ultimately he fails to convince us, in his final torment of poverty and rejection, that he is even remotely capable of composing the Requiem.

This is perhaps due to the TV variety show background of many aspiring actors and which shows through the veneer of this essentially Western drama. Certainly the relative lack of a strong ensemble tradition, which is the foundation of both the British and US stage, is lacking in Taiwan, and is the main obstacle to successfully staging "Broadway" drama here. For all that, the relative new comer Tsuo Jun (左筠), a former Miss Asia competitor and singer, does a remarkably fine job as Mozart's wife Constanze.