One of Grimeborn’s most striking rediscoveries: Mozart & Salieri at the Arcola Theatre reviewed

Mozart & Salieri
Grimeborn, Arcola Theatre, until 13 August

I have been a fairly conscientious reviewer of Dalston’s Grimeborn festival for the last eight years. The name is less suitable now than it was. The Arcola Theatre, where the operas are performed, is now only a stone’s throw from Dalston Square, with its chic apartment blocks and bars and the resplendent C.L.R. James library, and the whole neighbourhood is upwardly mobile.

The Arcola itself remains a ramshackle place, and you can expect the usual late start, inadequate provision of programmes, and general air of administrative amateurism. This year’s season began on 23 July, and runs till 8 September. Some of the operas are familiar, though likely to be staged in an unusual way, and with drastically reduced accompaniment. So far this year I have seen Rimsky-Korsakov’s rare Mozart & Salieri. It is a setting of one of Pushkin’s ‘little tragedies’, and may be responsible for the despicable and in all ways deplorable play and film Amadeus, though Salieri is portrayed as more sympathetic here.