Amadeus – National Theatre

Broadcast from the National Theatre, with live orchestral accompaniment by Southbank Sinfonia.

Michael Longhurst’s hallucinatory production plunges you right inside this toxic mind by having members of the Southbank Sinfonia become part of the action. Dressed in black, they flit about Olivier’s cavernous stage like spectres or spirits, their fragmented renderings of Mozart’s oeuvre almost like physicalised hauntings – at one point, the orchestra advances and then retreats, like persecuting Furies, as Msamati lies, prone and desperate, surrounded by pages from one of Mozart’s manuscripts.