A Sleuth Seeks Mozart’s Nemesis

One of the many ways David Suchet prepares for a theatrical role is by making private lists of the attributes he shares with his character and those he doesn’t. Seeing him without the weight and waxed mustache of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, then it’s fun to imagine what he might have in common with the brainy, pompous, irritating and charming Belgian detective with whom he has become so identified.

It is somewhat more daunting, however, to consider what the 53-year-old Suchet might see of himself in the character of Antonio Salieri, Mozart’s nemesis in Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus,” which opens at the Ahmanson Theatre today before heading for Broadway.

The play has been in rehearsals at the Chelsea Center Theater here after a run at the Old Vic.

Salieri, as many film and theater fans will recall, is the Hapsburg court musician who agonizes over his own mediocrity in the face of Mozart’s genius and feels betrayed by God, who gave such musical gift to a giggling, scatological upstart instead of to the devoted Salieri.

Exactly how he identifies with Salieri, the highly successful British character actor isn’t saying. A private list is private, after all. But Suchet will say why he thinks the tortured man who tried to silence Mozart’s music strikes a chord with so many people, himself included.

“Salieri represents all of us in his envy and jealousy, in his hopes and ambitions and his realization of the fact that there are going to be people better than him,” he said. “It is something that every person past 35 is aware of.

“A lot of people start life with huge hopes. There is such a thing as the American Dream. We all have dreams and get caught out by our dreams.”

Shaffer’s Salieri, however, may be more actively vengeful than most people. The play is based on rumors that circulated after Mozart’s death that Salieri had killed the younger composer. He didn’t, but he worked hard to ensure that Mozart lacked gainful employment and that his brilliant operas were heard by as few people as possible. He tried to kill Mozart’s music.

But Suchet insists that Salieri is no two-dimensional villain.

“He is a very complex man. He has evil intent,” he said. “But the play starts with Salieri as an old man who desperately wants to confess. One only wants to confess if one feels shame. Throughout the play, when he is narrating, he is not just saying, ‘Look how clever I am. I destroyed Mozart.’ He is well aware of the shame.

“He never asks for forgiveness. He asks for understanding. If you understand him, you won’t sympathize with him, but you have a deeper appreciation of why he did what he did.”

In his efforts to understand Salieri, Suchet visited the composer’s birthplace in the Italian village of Legnano. He made his way from there to “the huge, baroque city of Vienna,” as Salieri might have seen it.

“He arrived with a chip on his shoulder. He was an outsider, proving himself, trying to maintain respectability,” Suchet said. “He tried to behave well, to please God and the emperor.

“He is essentially a weak man, not a natural courtier. He is a small-town man, sort of out of place in the city. His music was quite good, but it was court music that he wrote to order. He was a conservative, traditional musician, not a Mozart, who felt he had to write. Who needed to write.”

Suchet, by contrast, seems to need to act. At least, he adores acting and seems to have been born to the medium. His mother was an actress, although his father was a successful gynecologist, and Suchet was expected to follow in his father’s scientific footsteps until he proved hopeless at physics.

He made his stage debut at age 5 as an oyster in “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” and at 23 became what may be the youngest Shylock in British stage history. The stocky, deep-voiced Suchet quickly made his mark as a character actor.

“My gift, if I have a gift, is to be different people, to understand people and to become them. I’m told there are not many of us around anymore,” he said. “There have always been film stars who will put bums in the seats and make the film industry a success. I would hate to be in that profession. It’s rather dangerous for an actor to have so much adulation.”

This may be the spiritual side of Suchet peeking through. Married and the father of two, Suchet is a religious Protestant who feels an affinity for Salieri’s struggle with God.

“Salieri believes naively that God is on his side, that he has a relationship with God because of the way he behaved,” he said. “His contest is with God, and he fights God by destroying Mozart.

“One always likes to believe God is on your side. Salieri believes God has let him down. He is betrayed by God. I put myself in the same position and wonder how it would feel to be in his place. It is despair when you feel God has let you down. It leaves you so isolated.”

Suchet clearly doesn’t feel let down. His dreams have been answered, he says.

There are three roles he has always wanted to play. One is the embittered academic George in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” which he played in 1996 in London’s West End. Another is Napoleon, which he has just finished doing for a black-comedy film called “Sabotage” that was written and directed by Spanish brothers Esteban and Jose Miguel Ibarretxi.

The third is Salieri, an intensely demanding role that keeps Suchet on stage for most of the play, switching back and forth between the 31-year-old Salieri and the composer as an elderly man.

It is so demanding, in fact, that Suchet gives up rich food, drink and other distractions while performing. The proof of this would seem to be his modest lunch of salad and tea during a brief break in rehearsals.

“I can’t play the role otherwise. I need the energy and vocal dexterity. It means I have to live life as a monk. There are not many roles that demand that kind of concentration. It is an intellectual and physical strain and emotional turmoil. It is like running a marathon,” he said.

On this wet fall afternoon, Suchet and director Peter Hall are going over the timing of his lines with Mozart’s music, and of his movements with those of his fellow actors. Suchet’s voice resonates above a noisy rain.

“And now! Gracious ladies! Obliging gentlemen! I present to you--for one performance only--my last composition, entitled ‘The Death of Mozart--or Did I Do It?’ ”

British actor Michael Sheen plays Mozart in L.A., as he did in London, but most of the rest of the cast is American and new to the show. Shaffer has tinkered with the 20-year-old script, trying to perfect it, and Hall is making changes in the staging. The play is still a work in progress.

Sheen, 30, who received favorable reviews in London, says he tries to portray Mozart not simply as a genius-victim but as a party to his own downfall.

“Salieri describes Mozart’s music as having incredible need in it. I started thinking of him as a needy person--in modern-day terms, someone like Michael Jackson who might have certain parts of his personality develop hugely and other parts stultified,” Sheen said. “He is not a genius, but possessed by genius. He has to live life almost with a terrible curse that he can’t understand.

“As much as Salieri and the establishment, he is being destroyed by his own genius.”

That makes two, of course, because Mozart’s genius also destroys Salieri, who doesn’t stand up to comparison.

While the London critics have been admiring of Suchet and Sheen, they have been less generous with the play itself. “Amadeus,” they charge, is as orderly and predictable as Salieri himself. “It is a great middlebrow work,” the Sunday Times’ correspondent wrote with damning praise.

In other words, the critics said, it is “just entertainment.”

But that doesn’t bother Suchet.

“If that’s how it’s going to be judged, that’s how it’s going to be judged. The audience goes away having had a complete evening of theater. There’s everything. Tears, laughter, anger, Mozart’s music,” Suchet said. “It’s an enjoying and fulfilling evening in theater. I celebrate that.”

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“Amadeus,” Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., (213) 628-2772. Today, 4 p.m. Regular schedule: Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 2 p.m.; also next Sunday, Oct. 24, Nov. 7 and 21, 7:30 p.m.; Nov. 22, 8 p.m.; Oct. 28, Nov. 11, Nov. 26, 2 p.m. Dark Thanksgiving. Ends Nov. 28. $25-$55.