[Amadeus] is a puzzlement. There are big things obviously wrong with it. It takes for ever to get started, as though Shaffer has thought of three or four possible openings and then used all of them. It tends, as is Shaffer's way in his loftier pieces—Equus, The Royal Hunt of the Sun—to over-verbalise everything, so that we seldom get a chance to feel his subject-matter in our bones because he is so busy telling us what we ought to be feeling (as if Shakespeare, instead of creating Iago, had written a play explaining him). (p. 48)

[Despite] frequent irritations,… I found myself taking more interest in the play than I felt somehow I ought to be: for quite a bit of its length it does, dammit, work. And I kept, fancifully, seeing other allegories in it…. I wish someone had persuaded Shaffer to prune the play and...