Revisiting Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play Amadeus is no small feat. Joe Barton, the writer behind Netflix’s Black Doves, has taken on the challenge of reworking Shaffer’s dense account of Mozart’s life and legend into a five-episode series for Sky Atlantic. It’s a bold move: the original play – and the 1984 film adaptation – already felt exhaustive, sometimes overwhelmingly so.

Yet Barton manages something unexpected. Shaffer’s monologue-laden tale of Mozart’s rival Antonio Salieri’s guilt becomes a sharper, more fluid exchange between two men bound by genius and self-destruction. This Amadeus is less about one man sabotaging another and more about two talents quietly collapsing under the weight of their own obsessions.

Less emphasis too is placed on Salieri’s ravings as “mad”, although his anguish is still front and centre. And because of the greater expressive range of both Paul Bettany as Salieri and Will Sharpe as Mozart, these performances feel more nuanced than their familiar counterparts from the 1984 movie. Bettany resists telegraphing Salieri’s insincerity towards Mozart in the way that his predecessor F. Murray Abraham does too often, while Sharpe is much more convincing than Tom Hulce in........

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