I Shall Hear In Heaven: Tama Matheson impressively incarnates Beethoven in an evening that puts music alongside the spoken word

Tama Matheson as Beethoven in his play, Beethoven: I Shall Hear In Heaven

Tama Matheson: Beethoven: I Shall Hear In Heaven; Tama Matheson, Jayson Gillham, Quartet Concrète, English Chamber Choir; Opera Holland Park
Reviewed 6 August 2025

Tama Matheson effective combines spoken drama with music to illuminate Beethoven’s life in an evening both theatrical and musical

Biographies of artists are, in the main, tricky because if you are not careful you can lose sight of the essential, the act of creation. Writers at least leave something that can be included, but with other artists the written word struggles as can anything dramatised. Director, playwright and actor Tama Matheson has been extending the way we dramatise musicians’ lives by writing plays that incorporate their music, not as simple background but as an integral part of the theatrical experience.

Beethoven’s life was eventful enough, but a simple recitation or dramatisation of the facts would lose sight of the essential core of his life, the creation of music, everything else was largely irrelevant. Tama Matheson’s Beethoven: I Shall Hear In Heaven debuted at the Wimbledon International Music Festival in 2021 and was nominated for the 2022 RPS Storytelling Award. In it, Matheson combines a dramatised biographical portrait of Beethoven with the man’s music, performed live.

Matheson’s Beethoven: I Shall Hear In Heaven played the first of two performances at Opera Holland Park on 6 August 2025. Matheson played Beethoven and was artistic director of the project and was joined by pianist Jayson Gillham along with actors Robert Maskell and Suzy Kohane, plus Quartet Concrète (Anna Brown, Leon Human, Dominic Stokes, Joseph Barker) and the English Chamber Choir.

Matheson’s set-up for the drama was the presence of two of Beethoven’s friends, Franz Wegeler (played by Robert Maskell) and Ferdinand Ries (played by Suzy Kohane) who produced an early biography of the composer in 1838, ten years after his death. Throughout the play, Maskell and Kohane used this set-up to act as narrators, taking us through the story but also playing a wide variety of extra characters, including Maskell as both Beethoven’s father and his teacher, Haydn, Kohane as a series of love-interests, and at various points both Maskell and Kohane played Beethoven’s sister-in-law, son of his nephew Carl (played by Kohane). This was very effectively done, and enabled the narration to create various set pieces for Matheson’s Beethoven.

There were an impressive 37 music cues in the piece, mainly music by Beethoven but with some Mozart and Haydn. The music came mainly from the piano sonatas, piano concertos, string quartets and symphonies, with the symphonic music in deft arrangements for piano quintet by Jayson Gillham. The music had various functions, some was diegetic as we heard music that the characters were playing or listening to, some was illustrative as we heard the piece that Matheson’s Beethoven was talking about and some was more mood setting. Sometimes it was just a snippet, but occasionally the focus was on a more extended excerpt enabling us to get to grips with the music.

The actors perhaps never quite solved the problem of what to do on stage whilst the music was playing, though Matheson’s Beethoven was wont to prowl around the stage in dramatic fashion. Occasionally the musicians were involved in the performance too, which was something that I thought could usefully have been developed. 

Without the presence of the music, the play would have been largely about Beethoven’s changing relationship to his deafness as the condition worsened. It is, after all, an essential piece of drama though his troubled relationship with his sister-in-law and nephew Carl received an important mention. But as we heard Beethoven’s music too, Matheson managed to successfully demonstrate how the progression of his deafness changed the composer’s relationship to his music, leading to the great final works.

Perhaps we were told a little too often how much of a genius Beethoven was, rather than being left to work that out for ourselves but Matheson’s resorting to panegyric was perhaps understandable if he was using contemporary biographies as his sources. There was comedy too. The problems Beethoven had when conducting made effective drama thanks to his resulting anger, thinking others were laughing at him. Another moment when a profoundly deaf Beethoven had a conversation with another deaf man rather overdid the joke, however.

Both  Maskell and Kohane provided superb support, slipping in and out of roles in a way that was very impressive and very effective. There was never a moment when you felt that the narrative was confused, and Matheson as writer largely kept the pace going though there were a couple of moments where the production dwelled for a little too long. 

But the centrepiece of the evening was Matheson’s own compelling performance as Beethoven, unlikeable and opinionated but Matheson somehow made you have sympathy with the man. Thankfully the production did not try to make too much of the dichotomy between the man with his unsavoury habits and the glory of the music.

The musicians were an essential part of the evening, turning from one piece to another without turning a hair. Pianist Jayson Gillham effectively gave us a potted version of the complete piano sonatas in thrilling fashion whilst Quartet Concrète were no less impressive in the quartets, whilst all five did justice to the symphonic moments. The English Chamber Choir sang two numbers, Elegischer Gesang which is something of a rarity and a moment from the last movement of Symphony No. 9.