Michael Sheen’s Amadeus so dazzling he disappears as we cheer his evil

THEATRE

AMADEUS ★★★★

Concert Hall, December 30

Until January 21

Having played Mozart in London and New York in 1999, Michael Sheen now slides into the sleeves and trousers of Salieri so completely that he disappears. The Welsh actor famed for playing Tony Blair or Bill Masters is nowhere to be seen; just the poisonous stew of jealousy, hate and fawning mediocrity that is Antonio Salieri, court composer to Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II.

The masterstroke of Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play was making artistic envy as toxic and all-consuming as to rival the sexual jealousy of Othello. Unlike the court and public, Salieri, the leading composer of his day, knows deep in his bowels that Mozart’s music is infinitely superior to his own. In his scheme of things, it is touched by God, when he’s prayed to be God’s voice on earth, himself, and had dared to think he was. But what he now hears is revelatory for a mind already straitjacketed into that mediocrity.

The challenge for the Salieri actor is that we need to care about his predicament, rather than putting all our sympathetic eggs in Mozart’s basket, or that of his wife, Constanze. Sheen more than meets this challenge. He gives us a Salieri so full and rounded that we almost resent the upstart Mozart ourselves; that we hang off every word, even though – in a triumph of the most delicious dramatic irony – we know most of what escapes Salieri’s lips is twisted and fabricated.

Sheen has the cadences of his lines so finely tuned that you seem to physically sit forward to grasp it all as he maximises the meaning of each syllable (not to mention the wit) without ever straining for effect.