‘A tale of genius and mediocrity’: Amadeus hits the Sydney Opera House
Musicologists may protest the considerable licence taken with historical fact, but Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus is almost perfect holiday entertainment.
When Rahel Romahn was growing up in western Sydney, the child of Kurdish refugees from Iraq, a trip to the city was a special outing. The family would visit Circular Quay and walk around to the Opera House, but Romahn didn’t think it possible that he could go inside.
“You know, when you don’t speak English and you don’t know what you can do?” he says. “It was like an art piece that you looked at from the outside. It was always an occasion, and an infrequent one at that, that we would go to the city and see the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House.”
Romahn has since been to the Opera House and even performed on stage in the Drama Theatre with Sydney Theatre Company. The rising young actor has now been cast in a dream role, as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus, to be staged in the Opera House Concert Hall, complete with orchestra, singers and chorus.
A performance of Amadeus would be a treat at any time, but this promises to be special. Opposite Romahn as Mozart’s nemesis, court composer Antonio Salieri, is Michael Sheen, the Welsh actor who previously has played Mozart in a celebrated production of the play in the late 90s. As Constanze, Mozart’s wife, is Lily Balatincz.
The actors are being dressed by Romance Was Born, so expect plenty of rococo-inspired gorgeousness. Accompanying the actors on stage will be a small orchestra, opera singers and chorus, filling the Concert Hall with Mozart’s glorious music.
Opening in late December, the show is an almost perfect holiday entertainment. The month-long run of performances will showcase the newly refurbished Concert Hall and form a key part of the celebrations leading up to the 50th anniversary of the Sydney Opera House next October.
Shaffer’s play, and the 1984 film of it, concerns the supposed rivalry between Mozart and Salieri: one the genius whose music seems divinely given, even as his spendthrift lifestyle and potty mouth leave something to be desired; the other a workaday composer at the Viennese court whose soul is consumed with such jealous hatred that he sets out to destroy Mozart’s reputation and his life. A mysterious commission for Mozart to write a requiem mass for the dead weakens the composer’s frail health, and Salieri thinks he at last has the opportunity to claim victory over his rival.
Musicologists protest the considerable licence taken with historical fact. Dramatically, though, it’s a terrific story, a tale of “genius and mediocrity” as Romahn puts it. The young actor already has made a character study of Mozart and read his very entertaining letters. Asked what he has learned about the composer, Romahn gives a beautifully musical answer.
“He sees in music, he hears music,” he says. “There are a lot of clues in his letters, the way he writes. I would say, if he’s in a conversation with a group of people, they all represent a sound, and an instrument.”
Mozart, as depicted in the play, is a singular character. “He definitely sticks out,” he says. “He’s rambunctious, he’s excitable, childlike, volatile at times, and very passionate – he has a strong sense of self-belief.
“I’ve been doing as much as I can to understand the sensual aspects of his existence – how physicality, vocality, and energy give an insight into someone’s history.”
Combining as it does drama, opera and orchestral music, Amadeus is almost the ideal vehicle with which to showcase the new-look Concert Hall, which reopens next week after more than two years of refurbishment works. The upgrades are intended to improve the hall’s attractiveness for a range of performance styles, including classical music, amplified contemporary music, and spoken-word events. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra will inaugurate the hall with a gala concert on Thursday, under new chief conductor Simone Young.
Visitors will be surprised at the Concert Hall’s refreshed appearance. A new passageway and lift will vastly improve access around the foyer areas, especially for less mobile patrons.
Inside, the hall has been fitted with acoustic banners, panels and other interventions to enhance the quality of sound. The most noticeable change is the installation of 18 petal-shaped sound reflectors above the stage, painted the same brilliant magenta as the seat fabrics in the auditorium. Backstage works and new theatre machinery have brought the venue up to speed with 21st century requirements.
The upgrade completes a “decade of renewal” at the Opera House – a program of venue improvements worth almost $300m, including work on the Joan Sutherland Theatre – as the World Heritage-listed building approaches its golden anniversary next year.
“You think about what the Opera House embodies – with opera, and symphony and what it was built for – and then you think of what the next 50 years will look like,” says Ebony Bott, head of contemporary performance at the Opera House.
“We are doing a contemporary staging of a work that combines all those elements. We talk about (Amadeus) as a play, but it’s a spectacle in this instance – because what you are looking at is a play powered by Mozart’s music, in the Concert Hall that has been refurbished for an enhanced experience.”
The Opera House has partnered with small independent company Red Line Productions on Amadeus, which secured the rights to Shaffer’s play, and with commercial producer GWB Entertainment. Craig Ilott is the director, and Sarah-Grace Williams will conduct the Metropolitan Orchestra. With set designs by Michael Scott-Mitchell, lights by Nick Schlieper, movement directed by Samantha Chester, and costumes by Anna Cordingley, working with Romance Was Born, Amadeus will be a true showcase of Australian creative talent.
Bott is delighted with the principal cast. Sheen is noted for playing historical characters, including broadcaster David Frost (in Peter Morgan’s Frost/Nixon) and British PM Tony Blair (in The Queen, also by Morgan).
Balatincz trained in New York and has worked as an actor and director. Romahn has had roles on screen in Shantaram and The Principal, and on stage with Sydney Theatre Company. Earlier this year he was named the recipient of the Heath Ledger Scholarship for young actors.
“We love that Lily and Rahel know each other, there’s a nice chemistry between them,” Bott says. “She’s a Sydney girl from western Sydney, she wears that really proudly. In terms of everything we are trying to do with the 50th anniversary – and celebrating what we are, and who we are working with, and looking to the future – to have Lily and Rahel in those roles is very exciting.”
Years after his first rambles around the Opera House, Romahn says he is honoured to be part of the building’s 50th anniversary celebrations. And playing Mozart is a dream role for an actor with Romahn’s theatrical imagination.
“It’s going to be a very joyous, wonderful, flashy night in the theatre, which is exactly as it should be,” he says.
Amadeus is at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, December 27 to January 21.