THE OTHER MOZART

Omnibus Theatre

★★★★

“Hilarious, moving and heartbreaking”

Despite being interested in classical music, I went into this performance knowing almost nothing about Wolfgang Mozart’s sister, Maria Anna ‘Nanneri’ Mozart—the titular ‘other’ Mozart-—a historical elision that creator, writer and performer Sylvia Milo’s striking and innovative work seeks to address.

In the form of a dramatic monologue, The Other Mozart narrates the life of Nanneri, from her early years as child prodigy born to a musical family in Saltzberg, then performing alongside her brother across Europe, through her teenage years as she is gradually sidelined and eventually left at home while her brother travels the continent, and finally as she is married to a baron living in an isolated castle. She ends her life orphaned and without her brother, returning to Salzberg to give music lessons.

This arc is performed wonderfully by Milo, who is totally engaging as the frustrated but still proud ‘talented’ sister to the ‘genius’ brother. Funny as a child, playing both the joy and annoyance of the older sister of a precocious younger brother, she becomes deeply moving in the pain of thwarted ambition. Throughout, she moves beautifully, aided by director Isaac Byrne and period movement director Janice Orlandi, a hilarious highlight being her mimed promenade with tall hair and a walking stick as she returns from fashionable Vienna to become the talk of the town in the relative backwater of Salzberg.

The staging reflects the originality of piece. An eighteen-foot dress with a spidery bodice sits erect at the centre of the space, its skirt scattered with musical scores, reviews of the siblings’ performances, and letters from Nanneri’s family, which she reads aloud or tosses away depending on their content – often she does both. The bodice is an ingenious piece of staging and costume design (by Magdalena Dąbrowska and Miodrag Guberinic). It sits there from Nanneri’s relatively free youth, a foreboding reminder of the constraints that bound non-noble women in eighteenth-century Europe, both sartorially and societally: despite her prodigious talent there is no suggestion that Nanneri will be able to follow her brother into a career in performance and the bodice constantly underscores that reality. When, following her marriage, she finally puts it on, it is a devastating moment. Nanneri’s taking up the restrictive dress of marriage is accompanied by a horrifying mechanical creaking and wrenching — a standout example of the excellent sound design by Nathan Davis—reflecting the rigidity and inescapability of roles available to women at the time.

The lighting (Joshua Rose) is stellar, picking out Milo in colour, casting her shadow onto the rear wall and fading her into darkness as her world shrinks. The use of powdered makeup and fragrance to catch the light is an especially effective technique that complements Courtney Bednarowski’s ostentatious hair design.

Musically, the piece also underlines the imbalance, the work of her brother, father, and contemporary noblewoman composer Marianna Martines are played loudly, while music standing in for Nanneri’s compositions (by Nathan Davis and Phyllis Chen) is played on bells, a music box or a tea set, the smallness and domesticity of the instruments nevertheless does not diminish its beauty.

Following success at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, The Other Mozart makes a triumphant arrival to London. Working with limited archival sources (Nanneri states that the letters she sent to her brother have not been saved), Milo has crafted a moving portrait of the overshadowed sister of one of music’s great names. Hilarious, moving and heartbreaking by turns, Milo’s piece shines a light on a frustrated St Cecilia and asks us to question which other unique, female voices have been silenced throughout history.

THE OTHER MOZART

Omnibus Theatre

Reviewed on 16th April 2026

by Rob Tomlinson

THE OTHER MOZART

★★★

“an interesting new play that grapples with big questions of what it means to be human”

In a claustrophobic hotel bar on a foggy night in London, two old university friends meet, some twenty-five years after they lost touch. As the piece unfurls, we learn that medical researcher Helena’s (Bryonie Pritchard) husband left her for her university friend, children’s illustrator Ruth (Jilly Bond), fracturing their previous relationship apparently beyond repair. The characters slowly realise that the apparently chance meeting was engineered by their late, shared (ex-) husband Tony for the reading of his will. The Dawn of Reckoning is a new play written by Mark Bastin and directed by Matthew Parker, that seeks to explore the enduring guilt of the missteps and misfortunes that mark our lives, as well as the enduring power of friendships forged in the early days of adulthood. It asks whether second chances are possible and how we can forgive ourselves and move on.

The two women strike a marked contrast, even down to their choice of nightwear, the no-nonsense Helena in comfortable-looking button-up blue pyjamas and the Ruth in a much more glamourous silken nightgown and turban, the work of production and costume designer Hannah Williams. Both Pritchard and Bond give strong performances, that range from an initial mutual wariness to moments of despair and a moving scene in which the women comfort one another. They are especially good at shared excitement when reminiscing about drunken nights out, capturing the ease with which we can all talk about a shared past in preference to confronting a more uncomfortable present, even if Helena is always only a few moments away from a withering barb. This simmering resentment is well conveyed by Pritchard, and Bond excels at Ruth’s morally superior attitude of forgiveness, by turns endearing and infuriating, to which Pritchard responds accordingly.

The play balances the darkness with moments of comedy, especially Helena’s repeated filling of her whisky glass from the unattended hotel bar, and when Ruth sets off the fire alarm by smoking a cigarette out of the window, allowing the women to return to an adolescent sense of mischief and complicity.

The sound design (Andy Graham) and lighting (Abigail Sage) counteract the realism of the narrative. Dimming bulbs, unsettling noises, the distinctly London sound of mating foxes, and the glowing fog outside the window inject a sense of the surreal into proceedings, as do moments of abstract choreography, where the characters move in a kind of synchronicity, gesturing both towards the increasing unreality of the situation and perhaps to their shared bond that goes deeper than words.

Narratively, The Dawn of Reckoning is complex, including multiple changes of direction and revelations that emerge over the relatively short runtime. Without giving anything away, some of these are successful, while others move towards the melodramatic, and the play’s climatic moments could perhaps have used a slightly longer lead-in to land more effectively. Nevertheless, this piece is an interesting new play that grapples with big questions of what it means to be human. Even if it does not always provide satisfying answers, it demonstrates a writer and director that are willing to let the script and acting take centre stage.

Tag Archives: Rob Tomlinson

THE OTHER MOZART

★★★★

Omnibus Theatre

THE OTHER MOZART

Omnibus Theatre

★★★★

“Hilarious, moving and heartbreaking”