My Life in Pieces (24 page)

I’m sitting in my tiny bedsit in Hampstead in the sweltering summer of 1978 thinking about Zen Buddhism. The phone rings. ‘Callow?’ a voice growls. ‘Dexter. Listen. Ruby Shaffer’s written a play about Mozart and you’re going to play Mozart so you’d better get your fucking Köchel numbers together, hadn’t you?’ ‘I suppose I had,’ I say. And he rings off. Now, there were a number of remarkable aspects to this conversation, not least the fact that John Dexter, Head of Productions at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, original director of
The Royal Hunt of the Sun
,
Equus
and the legendary production of
Othello
in which Laurence Olivier had played the title role, was one of the most powerful directors in the world, I was a relatively unknown, relatively young, relatively new actor (I was twenty-nine and I’d only been acting for five years), and he had never seen me act in any medium. I’d met him once, it’s true, in conjunction with another play – he’d given me kippers at the Savoy and we’d got on splendidly – but the play had never happened, and I had heard no more from him. Now here he was barking down the line at me and telling me that Peter Shaffer had written a play about Mozart. I knew enough about the business to know that this was a piece of theatre history in the making. The team was perfect: a play about Mozart, good. A play by Shaffer, very good. But a play
about
Mozart
by
Shaffer (and directed by John Dexter): a dream ticket, as we hadn’t yet learned to say. But how would he write it? What was the story?

The play was on my doormat later that afternoon – the first script I’d ever had biked to me – and I found that I already knew the central situation. By obscure chance, being a bit of a classical music trainspotter, I had heard Rimsky-Korsakov’s one-act opera
Mozart and Salieri
, a setting of Pushkin’s little drama of the same name inspired by the notion that Joseph II’s Court Composer Salieri had poisoned Mozart; the story had first appeared in the conversation books of Salieri’s former pupil, Beethoven, by then so deaf that he could only hear with his eyes. Pushkin’s play is brief, dark, chilling, a simple and haunting tale of envy and rivalry. Shaffer, I discovered, had taken this grim anecdote as a starting point for a vast meditation on the relationship between genius and talent, postulating a Salieri who was industrious, skilful and pious, driven to frenzy and ultimately homicide by a Mozart who was foul-mouthed, feckless, infantile and effortlessly inspired. Salieri, in Shaffer’s play, was the one person in eighteenth-century Vienna who fully grasped the extent and implication of Mozart’s genius, and was thus the one most savagely
wounded by what he saw as a cruel joke perpetrated by the God he worshipped: the vessel chosen to receive the greatest music ever written was the least worthy of His creatures, all Salieri’s piety, diligence, good taste and talent passed over in favour of a repulsive little nerd. The cosmic insult thus delivered, reasoned Shaffer’s Salieri, was a snub to virtue everywhere. What was the point of living morally and decently if the only thing that really mattered – to Salieri, at any rate – was quite independent of decency and morality? The only way to silence those intolerable questions was to snuff out the source of them: to erase Mozart.

I was not yet thirty and on the brink of a promising career, but I could understand that. Who has not felt dully foolish as they diligently plough their furrow, doing the best they can with what they’ve got, only to see someone else who has some ability, some quality for nothing, for
absolutely nothing –
a face, a voice, a body, a brain – surge forward effortlessly to claim the golden prizes? It’s not even necessarily a question of the prizes: it’s the ability to do or be in some way extraordinary, beyond the reach of mere work or application or even talent. If one can’t be or do that, what’s the point? As I sat in my bedsit, one of a handful of people in the world ever to have read the play, I knew that before long the typed manuscript in my hand was going to be part of the lives of hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. Shaffer had touched a nerve, had dramatised an idea which would reach out to the collective inner experience of an audience in a way in which few plays –
Equus
and
The Royal
Hunt of the Sun
among them, as it happens – ever do. ‘Mediocrities!’ Salieri addresses us, claiming to be our patron saint, and scarcely a person in the theatre feels that he might be talking about someone else. (One night at the Olivier Theatre, a year or two later, one individual sat in her seat, bolt upright, keenly focused on the stage. The rest of the auditorium was keenly focused on her. Did Margaret Thatcher, that night, allow her eyebrow to rise ever so slightly at being included in Salieri’s mocking embrace? She hadn’t liked the play, she said afterwards: it was dirty.)

A question formed in my mind: was it true? Not did Salieri kill Mozart, but was Mozart really so immature, so unthinking, so unstable? Could he really have been Pete from
Big Brother
? Shaffer had mined Mozart’s letters – especially the ones written to his cousin Maria Anna Thekla in Basel – for scatological baby-talk, to rub Salieri’s nose in Mozart’s dirt. He had recycled certain myths (about Mozart never making a correction in his scores, for example). He had simplified his personal relationships. He had
omitted Mozart the endlessly adaptable craftsman. He had done, in other words, what a dramatist does: he had left things out if they were not germane to his purpose. He had written a Mozart, Mozart glimpsed by lightning, true, as far as it went, but not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We were in a theatre, not a court of law. As for Salieri: here Shaffer was free to make up a great deal, since so little was known of the private man. Above all, what he had done was to make the story not merely dramatic, but theatrical. The answer to my question – to all my questions – was provided by the dramaturgy, by the framing device: everything that happens in the play is told to us by Salieri. The stage directions were very clear on this point. Not merely are we to understand that Mozart’s character and his actions as we see them are filtered through the memory of a very old and distinctly eccentric man: so is his music. Shaffer’s dazzling idea was for us only to hear what Salieri could remember – fragments, sometimes exactly what Mozart wrote, often a mere approximation, on occasions a distortion.

Whatever I saw or didn’t see on that first reading – those first feverish readings, one after another – I knew that I had just been handed (without audition, without interview, without discussion) the part of a lifetime. Salieri was on stage for much, much longer than Mozart – perhaps twice, maybe three times as long – but every time Mozart appeared it was to dazzling effect, and when he wasn’t there, he was being talked about. He strutted, preened, shrieked, farted; he rutted, he burbled, he dreamed; and finally, after a long and frightening scene with a masked figure whom he took to be the messenger of death and whom he abjectly begged to reprieve him, he died. As imagined by Shaffer, this Mozart contradicted everything that his music seemed to be. The audience would be in a constant state of uproar, but in the end, they would be won over, their every preconception overturned. And this would be done by theatrical means, not literary ones.

I had been an ardent fan of Shaffer’s from my youth: for my A-level English paper I had written about his plays, which in the published editions come complete with descriptions of the first productions, and was thus deeply excited to see on the page, the virgin page, how essentially geared to performance
Amadeus
was at its core. One scene above all struck me as pure theatre: Salieri welcomes Mozart with a charming little march of his own composition to the Court of Joseph II where he is Kapellmeister. When the Imperial entourage has departed, and the two composers are
left alone, Mozart thanks Salieri for his march but – wouldn’t it be interesting, he says, running over to the keyboard, if you changed this phrase here? altered the rhythm a little? used this harmony? – and in a minute and a half, he has turned the Italian’s anonymous exercise in note-spinning into what the world will soon know as ‘Non più andrai’ from
Le
Nozze di Figaro
. The whole dynamic of the play was there, in that single scene, mediocrity mocked by genius. For an actor it was, to borrow a phrase, pure theatrical Viagra.

And I was that actor. Who, however, would play the central role, Salieri himself? Dexter invited me to lunch at the Savoy, scene of our one previous meeting, and introduced me to Peter Shaffer, quizzical, feline, funny, above all modest, and anxious about the destiny of his play. Dexter was in rampant form, like a Tartar warlord, dividing up kingdoms, making demands, devising strategy. He
might
do the play at the National, but only when Jocelyn Herbert, the designer of his choice, was free, which could be three years from now. He would insist on twelve weeks’ rehearsal, which ruled out a commercial production. He would get Michael Tippett to write the incidental music. And who, I asked, who would play Salieri? Dexter hadn’t made his mind up. It should be Larry, but Larry was frail. John was too nice. Ralph too mad. Burton? Drunk. Christopher Plummer? Not Italian enough. Paul Scofield? suggested Peter, timidly. My heart skipped a beat. Scofield, the master of human complexity, his body all circumflex angles, with his witchy ability to sound every subtle resonance in a phrase, finding echoes and reverberations that opened up doors into unknown cavities in the human soul. Yes! ‘So much – gravitas,’ I said, suddenly doubting whether that was a very smart thing to have said. ‘Too much fucking gravitas, dear. We’ll have to knock that out of Mrs Scofield if we cast her.’ ‘Right,’ I said, ‘we will.’ He signed for lunch and was gone. Peter sighed deeply. ‘You see?’ he said. I did. It was wildly exciting.

We chatted for a while and I went back to my bed-sittingroom and heard nothing. Nothing at all, for months. Once or twice in the foyer of some theatre I would bump into Shaffer, who seemed to be sick at heart. ‘This can’t go on,’ he moaned. ‘It won’t. I know my plays. They have to be done when they have to be done.
Amadeus
has to be done now.’

More months elapsed. I was deeply unemployed. I turned thirty. That day I spent my last few pounds on hiring a dinner jacket to go to a party, knowing that the following day I would have to think seriously about finding another profession. Next morning there was a call from my agent.
John Dexter wanted me to play Orlando for him at the National Theatre. Oh, and they also wanted me to play Mozart in a play called – was it? –
Amadeus
, directed by Peter Hall. Paul Scofield would be playing Salieri. And so it came to pass. Dexter and Shaffer had finally fallen out over a matter of royalties: Dexter wanted to be paid every time the play was done, whether in his production or not. That was pretty shocking. But it went deeper. Peter had been rolling on the carpet every night during their discussions, whimpering and sobbing. He could no longer endure John’s view of a play as a piece of crude raw material for him to shape. Dexter thought he was playing out the scene at the piano between Mozart and Salieri in real life, and there were no prizes for guessing which one he thought he was in that relationship. What I had read – the supposedly crude, raw material – told me otherwise.

While we were doing
As You Like It
, John’s thoughts were only bitter, and the production of that sunniest of plays was infused with his rage and resentment.
Amadeus
, on the other hand, was as open and even a rehearsal as I can recollect, Shaffer ever-willing to change, rewrite, reshape, Hall amiable, always loyal to Mozart, Felicity Kendal superb as Constanze, cheeky, shrewd, sexy, with a core of obsidian right down the centre, Scofield slowly, quietly marinating the huge role in some profound personal essence, filling it with those notes which are his alone to command. The first preview brought an eruption of passion from the audience which continued unfalteringly for the two years we played it at the National (except of course for the night Margaret Thatcher paid her visit and withheld her compliments).

A few years later, I directed the play at the Theatre Clwyd in Mold. I had some pretty smart ideas about the piece. I wanted to set it in a lunatic asylum during the Napoleonic bombardment of Vienna in 1809. The inmates – all musicians, among them Salieri – would play out the story against that backdrop; they would make music with whatever came to hand, trying to evoke Mozart’s work on saucepans, bottles, washboards. Inexplicably, Shaffer was a little resistant, so I devised another scenario, one where the action came to life in an abandoned theatre. There was a High German Romantic, an E. T. A. Hoffmann, quality to the piece that I was trying to nail, and with the young Rupert Graves at the height of his youthful beauty and brilliance as Mozart, we finally found it. During rehearsals, though, I had sat watching the play I knew so well and despairing. It seemed so flat, so thin. The moment the technical rehearsals
began and we had the costumes and the lights and the effects and the music, the old magic began to assert itself, and when the audience arrived, they were as enraptured, as disturbed, as moved as spectators at the National Theatre had been the first time round. Shaffer has constructed a piece of theatre which can be staged in a multitude of ways; only one which denies its theatricality can fail.

I was now back at the National, as a Leading Man, ten years after leav
ing it as an ’umble box-office clerk. Of course, it was a very different
National: Denys Lasdun’s vast Theatropolis on the South Bank was a thou
sand times better equipped than the Vic, and though the backstage areas
were charmless and functional, the whole operation was superbly organ
ised and efficient. The canteen was slick and practical, dispensing a
million meals a day, and commanded superb views of the Thames, but it
lacked the sweaty, steamy intimacy of the Vic’s underground cubby-hole,
with its temperamental little chef. There was a Green Room (the actors’
bar, actually), which the Vic never had, and there were veritable armies
of actors, among them some friendly faces from the Old Days (Anna
Carteret and Mike Gambon and, indeed, dear old Boddington). In the
Green Room I was greeted by the lovely Scottish actor James Grant, who
had remembered me from
The Thrie Estates
in Edinburgh (how? He was
the King and I was sprawling on the steps). ‘Hi, Simon,’ he said, ‘Wel
come to the Green Room. See that hole over there, in the carpet? That’s
where Derek Newark falls.’ This was an allusion to the tall, notoriously
bibulous actor who was one of the key members of Bill Bryden’s company
at the Cottlesloe. And there was John Dexter, never a comfortable pres
ence anywhere, and inextricably associated with the idea of Olivier’s
National Theatre, who was the whole reason for my being there. This
monstrous but perversely lovable figure wrote an interesting if involuted
autobiography,
The Honourable Beast
, but the most vivid account of him
is to be found in the pages of
The Birth of Shylock, the Death of Zero Mostel
, by the writer with whose early work he had been so closely
involved, Arnold Wesker. Their relationship was nothing if not challenging
– but every relationship with Dexter was challenging. (Taunted by Dex
ter’s constantly referring to him as Ruby, Peter Shaffer had one day said,
‘Now, look here, Rose –’ ‘Rose?’ ‘Yes: as in “rose, thou art sick”.’) I
reviewed Wesker’s book in 1997 in the
Sunday Times.