Msamati’s performance is dignified, calculating, intelligent. The processes of history, displacing Salieri in favour of Mozart, are at work throughout, and Salieri has to work twice as hard as anyone to keep himself centre stage – though the moment he most effectively achieves this is the moment he cuts his own throat with a razor. Some of the finest sequences involve brief stagings of Mozart’s operas in which Salieri stands helplessly on the stage with the performers, gesturing wildly in disbelief at what he is witnessing, his complaints drowned out by the sublime music. Salieri’s envy is so complete and corrosive that even when trying to tell his own story, he can’t stop Mozart impinging on it. What’s crushing – for Salieri, at least – is that even though this is his story and his perspective (he even has the privilege of being able to see the modern audience, bringing the house lights up on them at the start), he still ends up decentred. It’s clear, then, how much this is Salieri’s story, his final masterpiece, as he weaves together orchestra and opera and actors and set in a dazzlingly choreographed overview of his and Mozart’s careers.

It’s an audacious play and a demanding role, with Salieri not only narrating the three hours of the play with barely a break, but also – at least in this production – timing his narration to conduct and align with a large on-stage orchestra which accompanies the production as a shifting chorus. Michael Longhurst’s production of Amadeus places Salieri at the heart of a spectacle.

Amadeus by Peter Shaffer