SOURCE: "Theatre Chronicle," in The Hudson Review, Vol. XXXIV, No. 2, Summer, 1981, pp. 263-68.

In the essay below, Asahina charges that Amadeus, like many of Shaffer's other plays, is inconsistent and self-contradictory.

There are two kinds of people, according to a variation on an old joke: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don't. Peter Shaffer certainly belongs to the first kind. For nearly a quarter-century, he has presented an almost Manichean world-view in one play after another. The characters and settings change: Pizarro and Atahualpa, conquerer and conquered in sixteenth-century Peru; Martin Dysart and Alan Strang, psychiatrist and patient in contemporary England; Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Kapellmeister and Chamber Composer (and possibly murderer and victim) in eighteenth-century Vienna. But the basic plot—a struggle between two opposing but mutually dependent males—remains the same, whether the play is called The...