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by Peter Shaffer, directed by Tim Carroll

Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

August 15–October 4, 2026

Salieri: “I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint”

This is the first year the Shaw Festival has presented a play by British playwright Peter Shaffer (1926-2016). Although the Festival no longer claims to present works by Shaw and his contemporaries, Shaffer counts as a contemporary since life overlapped with Shaw’s by 24 years. Why the Festival has chosen Amadeus (1979) as the play to revive is a mystery. The concerns the plan by a self-proclaimed mediocre composer, Antonio Salieri (1750-1825), to destroy the musical genus Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91). The idea of mediocrity destroying genius might have seemed vital in 1979 but now feels irrelevant. We’re in a world where ignorance has set out destroy knowledge and unregulated power to destroy the rule of law. It’s very hard to summon any interest in Salieri’s complaining that he is not a genius. It is especially hard in this production by Tim Carroll where Salieri’s quest to ruin Mozart is downright tedious.

Most people likely know the story of Amadeus not from seeing the play but from the 1984 movie with a screenplay by Shaffer based on his play. Last year Sky Atlantic broadcast a miniseries based on the play. The trouble with Shaffer’s original play is that it may have an historical setting and feature characters from history, but it is otherwise a pack of lies. The movie and now the television series only help to perpetuate those lies.

Most people will know that the story concerns the rivalry of Salieri, Court Composer to the Habsburg Court, and newcomer Mozart, who Salieri, but no one else, recognizes as a genius. Salieri goes so far as to call Mozart’s music “the voice of God”. At the start of the play when Salieri is in the last year of his life, he claims to have killed Mozart. What Shaffer does not mention is that Salieri suffered from dementia in the last year-and-a-half of his life and made those claims only when mentally at his worst. In periods of lucidity, he denied intending Mozart any harm.

The play focusses on a fierce rivalry between Salieri and Mozart. There was no such thing. They both respected each other and even collaborated on a cantata and an opera. Shaffer depicts Salieri as a bitter old bachelor. In fact, Salieri was only five years older than Mozart, was married and had eight children. Shaffer depicts Mozart as a musical genius but a childish, foul-mouthed buffoon in public. Shaffer gets Mozart’s playfulness and dirty jokes from Mozart’s letters, but there is no evidence that Mozart did not know how to behave at court. After all, he had been exposed to court society since he was five. Shaffer shows Salieri helping make The Marriage of Figaro a failure. In fact, Salieri was the one who helped to get it revived. Shaffer shows The Magic Flute as a failure because it upset the Masons. In fact, the opera’s effect was just the opposite and the Masons celebrated it. Shaffer has Salieri secretly commission a requiem from Mozart and then hound him to distraction by appearing as a grey-clad figure every night beneath his window. In fact, an aristocrat Count Franz von Walsegg commissioned the piece, periodical peered at Mozart’s window to see if he was at work and planned to pass the requiem off as his own.

Shaffer depicts Mozart’s wife, Constanze, as as much a ninny in public as Mozart. Shaffer depicts her as mercenary after Mozart’s death when in fact she managed to rescue herself and her children from poverty through organizing memorial concerts and arranging for the publishing of his posthumous works. Shaffer has Constanze leave Mozart when his illness is at its worst. She did no such thing. Shaffer claims Mozart was buried in a pauper’s grave. In fact, he, like anyone who was not an aristocrat, was buried in a so-called “common grave”, i.e. a grave for a commoner.

The most important fact that Shaffer omits from the tale of Salieri versus Mozart is that they were not the only important composers in Vienna. Also in Vienna and alive at the same time was Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827). It was Beethoven’s radically different, highly personal form of music that caused a major shift away from the style of 18th-century music, including, for a time, that of Mozart. If Salieri complains that his music is no longer played anymore, it is because of the rise of Beethoven, not because of Mozart. It is true that after Beethoven, Mozart’s music was soon revived. It has simply taken longer for people to appreciate the virtues of Salieri’s music. In 2003 famed soprano Cecilia Bartolli issued a CD devoted solely to arias from Salieri’s operas. Since then, operas by Salieri, especially his Falstaff (1799), have seen one or more revivals each year. Four different operas by Salieri were revived in 2025 alone.

With so much of the “history” in Amadeus turning out to be pure fiction, the plays interest lies in the tension Shaffer generates between two figures symbolic of Mediocrity and Genius. When the play premiered it was gripping. I saw it when it transferred to New York in 1981. The success depended entirely on the quality of the acting and the incisiveness of the direction. In the current Shaw production, there are problems with both.

The play begins in 1825 with an aged Salieri on the last day of his life. Following Shaffer, Tom Rooney gives the character lots of bitterness but no dementia. Shaffer gives the scene the chance for a virtuoso turn when Salieri throws off his old person’s rags and reveals the man, he was back in 1781 when he first met Mozart at court. As Shaffer notes of the young Salieri, he speaks “in a young man’s voice: vigorous and confident”. Of the four productions I have now seen, only John Wood was able to effect suddenly a complete change of speech and demeanour right before our eyes. Carroll doesn’t even allow Rooney the on-stage transformation and has him step offstage and return as the young Salieri. Even then, in an actorly opportunity missed, Rooney does not make the young Salieri all that different from the old one.

Initially, this is not a problem, but over time Rooney’s failure to modulate from his bitter, carping tone becomes tiresome. Even in the scenes when Salieri praises Mozart’s music, Rooney can’t seem to extract Salieri’s acerbity from his speech. After hearing a character so self-involved that he complains for two-and-a-half hours about how he is cursed with not being a genius, the logical response is “Get over it. Who said genius is a reward for being pious?”

As Mozart, Michael Therriault does serve as a contrast to Rooney’s Salieri by being more physically active and, with Constanze, sexually playful. But, strangely enough, Therriault’s Mozart leaves no distinct impression. Partially this is because Shaffer’s later revisions tried to tone down Mozart’s silly boisterousness. Partially, this is because Therriault can’t seem to illustrate that Mozart’s apparent foolishness and his genius are two sides of the same person. Where Therriault succeeds is in depicting the misery of the dying Mozart. There he finally gives us a figure we can relate to.

Kristi Frank presents us with a Constanze who is much wiser than her childish games with Mozart would indicate. We are glad that she calls Salieri’s bluff of asking for sex in return for furthering Mozart’s career. Shaffer sabotages any actor’s chance of making Constanze appear as a consistent character, but Frank is strong enough to present Constanze as a woman truly in love with her husband.

The most enjoyable character is Emperor Joseph II played by Graeme Somerville. Somerville shows the Emperor as well-meaning but blissfully dim. Julia Course and Sochi Fried are superb as the Venticelli, or rumour-mongers of Vienna. The pair speak their intertwined lines so perfectly that often you can’t tell when one has stopped and the other started.

While Judith Bowden has designed sumptuous period costumes for the production, her set is rather peculiar. The upstage half of the set is on a raised platform with a translucent curtain in front of it. In his notes, Shaffer calls this a “Light Box”, and he expressly intends it to show various characters in silhouette before we see them. With the help of Kevin Lamotte’s lighting, Carroll brings off this effect well, the silhouetted groups often appearing like illustrations in 18th-century books.

The downstage half of the stage is occupied by a ramp that gradually rises upward stage left. This ramp has grooves in it that light up, often giving the effect of a staff in music. There are no bar lines, however, to mark the staff into measures. The main difficulty this ramp poses is that it concentrates most of the action in a small space downstage right on the largest stage at the Shaw Festival. It’s a mystery why the ramp is there or what it represents, but it unnecessarily constricts the action.

It is extremely ironic that a play about mediocrity confronting genius should so emphatically lean towards the former in its production. Without strong performances from either Salieri or Mozart to carry us through or strong direction to draw us in, the artifice of the premise and development of Amadeus is more apparent than ever. In the programme Tim Carroll’s Director’s Note is oddly entirely about himself. He has nothing to say about Amadeus, a fact painfully obvious in the production.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Julia Course as a Venticello, Tom Rooney as Salieri and Sochi Fried as Venticello; Tom Rooney as Salieri and Michael Therriault as Mozart; Michael Therriault as Mozart and Tom Rooney as Salieri; Graeme Somerville as Emperor Joseph II (far left), Tom Rooney as Salieri (centre), Michael Therriault as Mozart (at harpsichord) with ensemble. © 2026 David Cooper.

For tickets visit: www.shawfest.com.