http://spwebdesign.livejournal.com/31... ( )

The play is strikingly different from the film. Pay special attention to the stage directions for the "hissing" noise created by repeating Salieri's name, and the stark modernist set. It makes for a completely unique mood in the play not recreated in the film. Schaffer has the sheer audacity to run head first into situations that would scare away a weaker playwrite, and does so with charm and finesse. ( )

This is the libretto of the show. Amadeus is a wonderful representation of Mozart's life and it's told through the eyes of a sneaky Saliere. ( )

Seeing this play on stage earlier this season is what made me realize how much I loved Peter Shaffer. The film version is far less deep and complex, and does not for a second hint that it came from the same writer as Equus. The stage version is as clearly the work of the same artist as Man of la Mancha's book is clearly the work of David Wasserman, who also adapted the script of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest.

Plays are meant to be watched, but as we cannot have a production of Amadeus available to each of us at any time we want it, then this one must be read rather than watched in the form of a movie which omits most of the most important part, Salieri's monologues.

There is one slight fault with this edition: after reading Peter Shaffer's new preface, detailing the six versions of the play, I find myself longing for a "definitive edition," containing the current, sixth version along with appendices of earlier (stage) versions of the scenes which were most altered. This would probably be a large, expensive hardback even if the film version were omitted (considering that it would probably have to be included in its entirety to show all the revision), but a woman can dream. ( )

This isn't the first time the rumoured "murder" of Mozart by Salieri has been staged (the poet Alexander Pushkin wrote a play on the subject called MOZART AND SALIERI, adapted into a one-act opera by Rimsky-Korsakov in 1898), but I'd be extremely surprised if anyone else touched it after this. Shaffer's made the subject-matter unquestionably his own, taking two figures and bringing out classic, eternal themes - psychotic jealousy, Divine indifference, cosmic injustice. Far more dirty, pungent and mannered than the Forman screen adaptation of AMADEUS, but more authentic too. ( )