On Stage
SAUVAGE, LEO
IN THE CLASSROOM Every semester scores of teachers and thousands of students use The New Leader as source material in Political Science, Government and History courses. This year The New Leader is...
...he cannot be blamed for what playwright and director require of him...
...Some may regret that Paul Scofield, who played the part in London, is not in the New York production...
...His wife, Gunhild, occupies the lower floor and also cuts herself off from the world, but refuses to so much as speak with her husband...
...John Gabriel Borkman is the epitome of advanced Ibsen...
...Perhaps this is intended to show how abject and ineffectual anybody close to the hapless Mozart must have been...
...The city was among the first to discover the play, which had its premiere in Helsinki on January 10,1897, and was put on in New York in the November of that year...
...While it is certainly plausible that an ambitious young wife would make the "supreme sacrifice" to further her husband's career, that she would do so as lasciviously as the cheapest trollop is utterly absurd...
...He probably had a hand, too, in the quick closing of 77;e Marriage of Figaro, despite its popular success...
...By pushing too hard and too far, Shaffer renders it impossible to accept the Mozart of Amadeus...
...As the house lights dim, two other men emerge to exchange some simple but wonderfully expressive lines, completely unsullied by that American virus called "Actors Studio" (they will reappear in various costumes and situations, a two-man chorus...
...Or possibly the intention is merely to add to a good play a touch of the sort of sensationalism that sometimes helps make bad plays commercially rewarding...
...Playwright Peter Shaffer and director Peter Hall have proven that the answer is yes: Their Amadeus opened at the Broadhurst Theater to thoroughly deserved accolades as a major event of the season, yet we come away feeling that it is fundamentally unsound...
...The problem is not simply that we cannot accept an upsetting description of Mozart because we love his music...
...It includes conflicts between one man's fanatical hunger for power and his abandoned love's unswerving devotion, between unyielding bourgeois morality and social emancipation??if not generations and classes...
...In interviews, Shaffer has insisted that except for some literary liberties, his portrayal of Salieri scheming with every available means to ruin Mozart is compatible with the facts...
...All continues to be pure enchantment until the entrance of the eponymous Amadeus, who immediately arouses a nagging unease that keeps interfering with our esthetic pleasure...
...Clearly, John Gabriel Borkman, Ibsen's penultimate work, unambiguously comes out, if not for menage a trots, then for a very modern notion of free love...
...A more temperate, less farcical treatment might have convinced us that "the divinely innocent and virginal Mozartean muse" celebrated by music critics like Cecil Gray actually inhabited the wrong body...
...Marshall hold each other in a long embrace, for example, Pendleton is obliged to make them slowly rotate to avoid having some spectators see only one back...
...none have been monkeys...
...This year The New Leader is again a highly valued and popular teaching aid in colleges and universities around the nation...
...The set, beautifully designed by John Bury and lighted by Beverly Emmons, contains toward the rear a cleverly curtained stage-within-a-stage that in the course of the evening becomes the Court of Emperor Joseph II of Austria, the Viennese Opera, or Schikaneder's popular suburban theater...
...An old man sits in a wheelchair, his back to the audience...
...Acclaimed as a composer everywhere in Europe, he had among his pupils Beethoven, Liszt and Schubert...
...A distorted, defective character, he ultimately vitiates the play's whole structure by making its foundations rationally untenable...
...Salieri, the playwright posits, knows Mozart's music is infinitely superior to his own, even though he has all the honors and awards and Mozart is poor and unknown...
...I enclose...
...In spite of an apparent worldwide reluctance to revive it, the play is socially, psychologically and dramatically one of the Norwegian master's most powerful works...
...10010 Please send me.................subscriptions to The New Leader for the Spring Term 1981 at $3.00 per term per subscription...
...The entire action of the play takes place one winter evening, when a dying Aunt Ella arrives to try to win back a now-grown Erhart from his grasping mother...
...The fleeing trio symbolizes Ibsen's anticipation of the struggle for an emancipation that 60 years later became routine...
...Pendleton almost succeeds in circumventing the unnecessary complexities of arena staging...
...Had the play disclaimed any historical truth and been about a fictitious composer named, say, Johann Chrysosto-mus Gottlieb, we would still doubt that a silly monkey with stumbling feet, shaky fingers, and the gasps and giggles of a perfect idiot could ever play the piano...
...The rigid conventions of Ibsen's time are personified in a banker who has spent five years in jail for believing that he alone knows how to get things done, and in his vengeful wife, ashamed of her degraded status as the spouse of an ex-convict...
...Desk copy free...
...Once his father is released, he goes to live with his mother in her portion of the family estate...
...In engineering Mozart's misfortunes, Salieri is challenging God, who has dared to bestow overwhelming genius upon the wrong man...
...That New York is one of the few places to have a production of it today may not be altogether surprising...
...Now in its 30th year, Circle in the Square has brought together for this revival Irene Worth, Rosemary Murphy and E.G...
...I do not mean the historical and biographical underpinnings, although the Amadeus here is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart...
...Marshall, performers who are able to feel and follow Ibsen...
...It has been said that the music student could be considered a chaperone for the unmarried couple, and thus Ibsen's concession to the hypocrisy of his times...
...Tim Curry is quite good as the sick, tipsy and miserable Amadeus...
...What gives his play a dramatically promising theme, however, is Shaffer's explanation for this malice...
...McKellen is not second best...
...Theater-in-the-round might have been a welcome solution 30 years ago, when the Circle had little money and a space ill-suited for a stage...
...This curtain serves, too, as a backdrop for the motionless human shadows of the outside world (circa 1823) that the man in the WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART wheelchair is facing before he turns around, stands and announces that he wants to make a confession...
...But they needn't feel cheated...
...Shaffer's shortcoming is not an iconoclastic revision of music history, it is an outright dramatic blunder...
...And it is undoubtedly true that Salieri had the clout to secure a well-paid Court position for Mozart, but instead used his power to thwart such an appointment...
...Minimum order: five subscriptions...
...This is not only plain nonsense, it is contrary to the revolutionary imagination that animates the work, to say nothing of the text itself...
...The old man, who tells us how he systematically destroyed Mozart during the decade before his death in 1791, is Antonio Salieri, the honored Hofkomponist at the Imperial Court in Vienna...
...When Gunhild venomously reminds the divorcee that Erhart is seven years her junior and suggests that he might become interested in the young student (whose companionship remains indeed unexplained) the impetuous divorcee defiantly replies that she doesn't fear the possibility...
...When Irene Worth and E.G...
...In an extraordinarily gripping scene, we discover that Aunt Ella was the elder Borkman's first love: He confesses that he dropped her, not out of affection for her sister, but because it suited his grandiose business ambitions...
...Our student rate represents a remarkable value??$3.00 per term per student for a minimum order of five subscriptions sent to the instructor...
...If you are not already using The New Leader in the classroom, take advantage of this special offer now by returning the coupon below...
...The New Leader College Division, 212 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...In Paris he was more appreciated than Mozart, whose 1777-78 concert tour received (to the discredit of Parisians) what French writers described as a glacial reception...
...In any case, it is a pity---T heater lovers ought to be grateful to the Circle in the Square for staging Henrik Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman...
...Similarly, Jane Seymour as Constanze-Stanzl-Weber, the sister of Aloysia who became Mozart's wife, cannot be held responsible for an awful scene that transplants the apocryphal Hollywood casting couch to the Viennese Imperial Court...
...Already in despair because his love had been rejected by Aloysia Weber in Mannheim, Mozart suffered the loss of his mother at the end of that unhappy tour and soon became obsessed with the suspicion that Salieri was poisoning him...
...Since his parole John Gabriel has done nothing but pace the upstairs floor of his estate, brooding on vindication...
...But the impact of this conception and the play's credibility are undermined by excessive heavy-handedness in demonstrating how unsuitable a vessel Mozart was for radiant talents...
...She seeks solace in the hope that their son, Erhart, will one day redeem the family name...
...Because of the scandal and disgrace of his father's imprisonment, Erhart Borkman has spent his boyhood with Aunt Ella, his mother's twin sister...
...I cannot imagine why a company would retains its handicaps in a new theater, especially one built according to its specifications...
...Many geniuses have been unscrupulous, vicious and evil...
...British actor Ian McKellen, in the demanding role of the young and old Sali-eri, holds our attention throughout...
...The composer he calls Amadeus would have been bounced from any court or concert hall without a Salieri's intriguing...
...Still, she is the one who is at his side when he dies in the snow just after Erhart turns his back on all three of them and runs off with a headstrong divorcee and a young girl who wishes to study music abroad??the daughter of the one friend who remained loyal to Borkman through his solitude...
...While filing to our seats and for some marvelous minutes afterward, we are fascinated by a sense that, this time, we really shall witness dramatic art...
...Happily, too, Austin Pendleton's intelligent direction neglects none of the play's tensions, hopes and despairs...
...Name of instructor Name of college or university Address 16 January 26, 1981 On Stage DIFFERENCES OF CRAFT BY LEO SAUVAGE c ^^^an a play simultaneously beguile us with its style and repel us with its flawed thinking...
...He remains absolutely convincing even when dealing with the cipher Shaffer and director Peter Hall want us to believe is Mozart...
Vol. 64 • January 1981 • No. 2
