I think Peter Shaffer is insane. I don't know how he could keep coming back to Amadeus like this. I'm having trouble getting myself to revise The Celtic Cross, and that wasn't a West End hit! I guess it's just weird to me that when a play goes up, it isn't necessarily "finished." When a novel is published, that's it. There's not re-writing it at that point. You can do sequels, you can do spinoffs, you can do re-releases, but generally speaking, the original text remains intact. It's weird to be working in a medium where that isn't necessarily the case.
I don't know why, but I seem to have a hangup over changing something after it's "finished." It seems like once I see a play, that's the final product, and it should be changed. Sure, you can do different takes on it - you're going to have different productions, maybe even cut a few lines here and there, but overall, the text should remain the same. The differences in production should come from different interpretations of the text. I guess that's my feeling. But maybe I have a false sense of where the finish line should be for theatre.
Maybe it's that I don't want to be another George Lucas. The guy can't leave his stuff alone. And he just makes it worse. He created something awesome, and he should just let it be. I understand doing remakes of movies - like redoing Ocean's 11 to make it modern and sexy; and I can even understand the sequels (I'm not saying they're GOOD, I just understand continuing the story a bit), but if they were to go back and redo Ocean's 11 with the same characters, slightly changing certain plot points, it would be uber weird. But at the same time, I know that anything I've written as of now is not good as it is, including CC, and it needs to be rewritten. But I don't really know where to draw the line.
I don't want to become a JK Rowling, who will never be able to get away from Harry Potter. She can't seem to leave that alone, either, doing those rinky-dink books about magic that are kind of a part of HP's world, but not really. Harry Potter is done. The series is over. She should leave it alone now. It seems to me that this process should be more stressful, because if there's something Rowling doesn't like 4 years from now, she can't fix it. The books are published, finished, and there's nothing she can do. But, for reasons unbeknownst to me, that process seems less stressful to me. There's a clear deadline - at some point, it actually is finished. It seems that in Shaffer's view of theatre, there is no "done." You could keep going on forever and keep obsessing over one project. I don't approve. I think that would suck up too much energy, when you should be focusing on somthing new. I want to know that I'm actually done with something, instead of having a nagging sense in the back of my mind all the time, telling me I should fix something.
That being said, I think I liked the fim version of Amadeus's ending the best. I don't really know why. It just seemed the most fitting. I found the current ending to be somewhat dissatisfying. Maybe it was because I really wanted some barnburning action, and I got a more subdued encounter. And I really wish he would have kept the whole plot of Salieri dressing as the Figure and tormenting Mozart that way. I really liked that, and I wish he would have kept it. But this is an award-winning playwright - I'm sure he knows what he's doing.
KG
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