Peter Shaffer story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and court composer Antonio Salieri who, overcome with jealousy at hearing the "voice of God" coming from an "obscene child", sets out to destroy his rival. When the show moved to Broadway it won the 1981 Tony Award for Best Play and, like "Equus", ran for more than a thousand performances. After the success of "Amadeus", Shaffer wrote the play "Lettice and Lovage" specifically for Dame Maggie Smith in 1986, for which he was nominated for another Tony Award and Dame Maggie Smith eventually won the Tony Award for best actress after three nominations in
Peter Shaffer was revived by Massachusetts' Berkshire Theatre Festival in the summers of 2005 and 2007, by director Thea Sharrock at London's Gielgud Theatre in February 2007, and on Broadway (in the Sharrock staging) in September 2008. The latter production, which ran in New York until February 2009, required the stableboy to appear naked; its star, Daniel Radcliffe, was still associated with the "Harry Potter" films intended for general audiences, and this led to mild controversy. Shaffer followed this success with "Amadeus" (1979) which won the Evening Standard Drama Award and the Theatre Critics' Award for the London production. This tells the