Amadeus

I'll start with the obligatory listing of possible biases on my part. Jason Dohle and Carmen Miles have cat-sat/house-sat for me, Daniel Kershaw and I once attended a demonstration on the correct way to inject heroin, Grace Edwards tried to convince me I'd had a past life love affair with another woman, Ian Black has regaled me with tales of hidden body piercings, Lewis and Molly Johnson forced me to church recently, Vanessa Jensen and I were part of the navy seal team that located and dispatched Osama Bin Laden, and Eliot McCann takes delight in shouting "balls" at virtually everything I write on facebook. One of the above is pure fantasy on my part but you get the idea. Onto the play itself. Amadeus or The Rise and Fall of Antonio Salieri as it should perhaps more correctly be titled is on at the Old Mill theatre 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17 and 18 June having completed it's first week of production. Go and see it - this will be one of the better evenings you've spent at the theatre in a very, very long time. Eliot McCann owns the part of Salieri. There are certain actors in community theatre I'll go out of my way to watch - Peter Clark, David Gregory, Eddie Stowers, Adam Shuttleworth, Alex Jones, to name a few. McCann goes on the list. His performance is nothing short of astonishing, so good it actually made me feel (as a chap who treads the boards himself) he could have read the phone book for three hours and have had my attention throughout. He becomes Salieri before your very eyes whether its as an old man wrapped in his house coat, hands stiff with arthritis, voice reduced to a harsh whisper or as the younger scheming and tortured Salieri consumed by his hatred for the young upstart Mozart. As his tale unravels before you, not once do you not feel sympathy for the character even when he is using and manipulating those around him for his own ends. His motivations are so well sold by Mr McCann that they make perfect sense and you excuse his most heinous acts and even feel pity for him as the inevitable unfolds before you. It isn't often that you witness an actor in community theatre who captures both the art of dialogue delivery and the body language that goes with it so flawlessly. I know it sounds a little rapturous but its almost like a symphony in it's own right. Watch his hands and you'll know what I mean. Hands and arms are an actors nightmare - we never know what to do with them onstage. They hang there and we feel we must engage them and often that sees us flailing them around for effect because we feel they must be utilised. McCann tells us a great deal of his character through his body language. His hands perform precise motions whether dismissing a servant, rolling a sugar covered almond between his fingers, pointing, indicating, cupping, steepling. They are the gestures of a character who is at ease in his surrounds, sure of his purpose, artistic, refined, assured. He never overuses the body langauage, instead it completes the character for us. The same goes for his eyes - when the character is angry - they flash anger, when hes scheming - they narrow, etc, etc. I'm not sure I've ever witnessed a performance at community theatre level where voice and body were so in tune. The point of all this hyperbole is that McCann is no longer the Eliot McCann I know - he IS Salieri. We never catch McCann acting. Toward the close of Act 1 (I think it may be as he is listening to the Mass in C Minor) we see a great example of this. The music of Mozart swells and we very visibly see this wretched soul, enraptured by what he hears and yet visibly tortured by the recognition he does not have the talent to produce such sounds himself - this is played out to us through his eyes, the despair becoming more evident as the volume increases. I could go on but you get the idea. Magnificent. Daniel Kershaw plays the bratty Mozart with a fine degree of restraint. If the part is played simply as precocious musical talent and Salieri's motivation simply be promulgated by jealousy, we would lose sympathy for Salieri and you'd have no play. Therefore the writer has suggested that Mozart was an upstart, a libertine, seducing Salieri's prize pupil, absently scorning Salieri's work and all things italian, and just generally being a bit of a dick - not to the point where we actively dislike him, but enough for us to buy Salieri's viewing of him (from Salieri's point of view) as a monster and someone to be destroyed. Difficult to capture without going over the top or even worse, underselling the character. I think Daniel did a fine job, the annoying giggle, the boyish smile that could be interpreted as supercilious, the uncouth mouth and manners were all there but when it most mattered - toward the end of the play, we feel genuine sympathy for Mozart's plight, none better illustrated than when he is lying in a blanket in the fetal position whimpering, clearly having lost his wits. Another highlight for me was Daniel's performance as he disassembles Salieri's work and improves on it before his eyes, Salieri aghast, Mozart joyously unaware of the effect he is having OR is he? Very nice indeed. Barry Park as Baron Gottfried Van Swieten was also a delight to watch. What a fun part to play! A fussy little man, consumed by his own importance, easily provoked to irritation. Watching the interplay between Barry's baron and Salieri or Mozart was always entertaining and I found myself thinking "ooh, here he comes again" everytime he walked onstage. Barry's performance is a lesson in straight acting, no need to oversell it, it sells itself and his restraint made the character even more believable. I must also make mention of Brian Dennison as Count Orsini Rosenberg. I only really caught your irish accent in one line of the entire production. You and Mr McCann skipped through all that tricky italian exceedingly convincingly and we giggled at those little asides where you were undoubtedly sneering and sniping at others as though we understood what the hell you were saying. Nicely judged performance. Grace Edwards doesn't get to sing in this production which is a sin because I hear she has the voice of an angel. She does however get to play a role that requires her to be bawdy, brazen, coy, compliant, disgusted, motherly, and loyal. She does all very well and she is almost as tragic a figure as Mozart and Salieri. The remaining cast do a fine job in their respective roles, many of which require them to be seen and not heard. Very important in a production such as this not to draw focus from the main protagonists and none of you did. Must make a quick mention of Ben Anderson and Jason Dohle as Salieri's henchmen - nice brown-nosing guys. Lighting and sound. Hard to do a play entitled Amadeus without music and so we have a smorgasboard of same throughout. Music is the invisible character in this play and particularly the interplay with the character of Salieri. The musical cues were precise and clinically executed, none better than when Salieri is skipping through Mozart's work, repeatedly slamming the book of scores and not once did the music not stop precisely where it should or restart when that book opened. It's the little things in theatre that make the production and the sound helps make this play. Well done Molly. The lighting was nicely done as always by Lewis Johnson and I particularly liked the use of the front spot allowing Salieri to step out of the narrative and address the audience in isolation. Once again, the lighting enhances the narrative in this play - a good example is where Salieri completed his invocation to us the audience to hear his tale and on cue, the lights are on us allowing him to see us and regale us with his story although for one unnerving moment I thought McCann had spotted me and was going to be checking on how well I was listening throughout his monologue. The set also needs made mention of. It's a simple open set with harpsichord on the right toward the rear, and an up and down staircase, middle of stage rear serving as both an illustrative way of moving from location to location, and also as a raised platform for a number of scenes. A simple curtain drawn between flats left front of stage gives the illusion of a blind drawn across a window and from time to time backstage crew dressed as servants of that period bring on or off other furniture as required. That's it. How simple and how effective. It allows a largish number of cast a nice open space to play without being upstaged by furniture or set. I know there has been a tendancy in recent years to astonish audiences with complex sets that can run the risk of appearing to be the latest instalment of Transformers in their intracacy. Not required. This set gives the actors freedom to move and does the job very well. Excellent choice, well executed. Vanessa Jensen the director can be very pleased with this production. At three hours long (including interval) it still seemed a fast play, and a most enjoyable evening out. It deserves full houses and I'm sure others will provide far more inciteful comment and plaudits as the season unfolds. I loved virtually all the choices made with this production which is a rarity - usually I can pick on something. I implore anyone who enjoys quality theatre to go and see this - walk on broken glass if you have to. You will not regret it and any actors wanting tips on what they should strive for must see Eliot McCann's performance - it is literally breath-taking.