This section contains 3,323 words (approx. 12 pages at 300 words per page) |
![]() |
SOURCE: "Theatre Chronicle," in The Hudson Review, Vol. XXXIV, No. 2, Summer, 1981, pp. 263-68.
In the essay below, Asahina charges that Amadeus, like many of Shaffer's other plays, is inconsistent and self-contradictory.
There are two kinds of people, according to a variation on an old joke: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don't. Peter Shaffer certainly belongs to the first kind. For nearly a quarter-century, he has presented an almost Manichean world-view in one play after another. The characters and settings change: Pizarro and Atahualpa, conquerer and conquered in sixteenth-century Peru; Martin Dysart and Alan Strang, psychiatrist and patient in contemporary England; Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Kapellmeister and Chamber Composer (and possibly murderer and victim) in eighteenth-century Vienna. But the basic plot—a struggle between two opposing but mutually dependent males—remains the same, whether the play is called The...
This section contains 3,323 words (approx. 12 pages at 300 words per page) |
![]() |