Speaking nests and cuckoos with a lover of Chekhov—Irish atheist—on a wet afternoon at the Heat, I realised that I spent a consistent part of my infinite childhood in front of a telly on which Miloš Forman’s Amadeus was playing in a loop. Whatever my parents had in mind, I am not sure it worked. In fact, I’m sure it didn’t. However, watching it today after a long time and with relatively fresh eyes, I still find myself in the same exhilarating state of awe.
Rewriting for the screen, Peter Shaffer puts his hands on his own work with resolute butcher mastery, managing not only to preserve the integrity of the themes—the Apollonian and the Dionysian, agony and ecstasy, passion and discipline, and of course envy—but to make the story stronger, the dialogues even sharper, and fill some scenes with the most indomitable romanticism.
Under the mourning sky, three gravediggers raise their collars as they gloomily leave the shelter. Amidst the iron crosses and the tragic trees of a late autumn, the hearse has arrived. It is an ordinary morning of silent tears, shed for another dead Christ with no name like many.
