Master Class
by Terrence McNally
State Theatre South Australia/Adelaide Festival Centre
Optima Playhouse
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
Master Class is New York-based playwright, Terrence McNally’s account of sessions Maria Callas held at the Juilliard School of Music between October 1971 and March 1972. These classes, as Rodney Fisher’s informative program notes remind us, took place at a difficult time for La Divina. Her career was, by this time – like her voice – if not in shreds, at least in disrepair. This once great singer, who had been the toast of Milan’s La Scala and worked with Visconti and Zeffirelli, was in retreat. By her own account, the master classes, which attracted an increasing number of admirers and well-wishers, were a way of restoring self-confidence.
Rodney Fisher’s production, featuring Amanda Muggleton as Callas, is impressively assured. Jennie Tate’s spacious set, with its creamy deco dome dotted with lights, is like a snazzy close encounter of the third kind. David Walters’ lighting plan bathes the stage with sumptuous levels of wattage, and, when required, by means of a projected diorama, transforms a New York rehearsal room with two chairs and a Steinway into the baroque glories of the La Scala auditorium.
Master Class is substantially a monodrama with occasional dialogue. Manny, the accompanist, is played with a nicely wry understatement by Andrew Ross. The succession of neophytes – Callas’s “victims”, as she calls them – are less subtly drawn. Sophie de Palma, played by Tarita Botsman, dressed in a Tammy Wynette wig and a ghastly pleated pink number, prepares an aria from Bellini. Tenor Domenico Cannizzaro as the prosaic but talented Tony Candolino sings fromTosca , and Toni Powell is Sharon Graham, the luckless, over-dressed pretender to Callas’s own immortal Lady Macbeth.
As Maria Callas, Amanda Muggleton treads the difficult path between characterisation and impersonation. The physical impression is convincing, enhanced by careful costuming and Nana Mouskouri horn rims. But Ms Muggleton also captures the difficult mix of haughtiness and resignation that were only to deepen and consume the singer as she drifted further into loneliness and terminal despair. This play depends greatly on the acumen of the pianist and the three singers but it rests wholly on the performance as Callas. Amanda Muggleton is more than equal to this demanding task.
But she can be only as good as the lines themselves and – while I know from the enthusiasm of audiences that I am in a minority here – I have misgivings about the scope and assumptions in McNally’s play. There are are a number of incontestable facts about Callas’ life and career. Shedid have an ugly-duckling-to-swan transformation. Shewas a perfectionist and often temperamental. Shedid have a highly publicised relationship with Aristotle Onassis and was cruelly jilted by him. She also suffered a reversal of fortune when her voice declined and she struggled to maintain both her dignity and her livelihood.
In the hands of Terrence McNally, however, this legend of opera is reduced to archly camp sentimentality. From the first entrance the playwright has her conspiring with the audience. For those of us with little knowledge of the music we are flattered into a complicity with La Divina as she patronises the accompanist and disdains the stage hand. The worst autocratic excesses of the theatre and the least admirable elements of authoritarian teaching are presented, not only as reasonable, but amusing. Callas may well have been just like this, the lines might well be actual transcript, but it is sheer smugness on McNally’s part -and ours- to so easily assume such an unreflective view of events.
We are given too many ready made simplifications. The master class singers don’t have to be so one-dimensionally dopey. The New World, epitomised by soullessly philistine young Americans, is no match for Maria Callas made-over by old aristocratic Europe. There is too little distinction between style and snobbery, professional standards of conduct and meretricious rudeness. In the tricked-up flashbacks and reminiscences McNally reduces Callas to a mixture of Zsa Zsa Gabor and Judy Garland. Her true and terrible tribulations are made to sound like those of Scarlett O’Hara or the Little Engine that Could. And her editorialisings on the role of art and the responsibilities of the artist – notions for which she undoubtedly paid a very high price – are strung together with all the profundity of a Hallmark greeting card.
Rodney Fisher has presided over a handsome production which is graced with a fine performance by Amanda Muggleton. It is unfortunate that Terrence McNally’s much Tony-ed play has proved to be so complacently superficial. If he had let Maria Callas’s life in art speak for itself then the text could have been both complex and rewarding. Instead, the more he insists on- and asserts- the truth of the imagination, sadly, the more bogus it all sounds.
The Adelaide Review, June, 1998.
Coming up in June
29- 13 June.Tartuffe. Moliere translated by Christopher Hampton. Directed by Jim Vile. Theatre Guild at Little Theatre.
9- 20 June. Rishile Gumboot Dancers of Soweto. Stomping rhythms from South Africa. Optima Playhouse.
10 June. Michael Feinstein. Her Majesty’s.
14-15 June. Kylie Minogue. The Impossible Princess visits her loyal subjects. Thebarton Theatre.
16- 17 June.Up the Road by John Harding. Directed by Neil Armfield. With Paul Blackwell, Bradley Byquar, Lillian Crombie, Wayne Freer. Belvoir Company B in the Space.