|
Oxfordprospect |
|
|
||
|
1 February 2011
An Evening with Maria Callas.
"Master Class, by Terrence McNally."
By: Julia Gasper This highly original, prize-winning play about the legendary soprano Maria Callas uses the idea of a master class to recreate her powerful personality and tell her life story in retrospect.Towards the end of her life, when she could no longer perform, Maria Callas gave a few master classes at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. For the students in the play, this is a privilege that can turn out to be an ordeal. Stephanie Beacham’s performance as Maria Callas is a tour-de-force. From the moment she walks on stage she projects an immense presence, a tremendously self-possessed, forceful and complex personality, tough and hyper-demanding of herself and of others. She strikes up a relationship with the audience immediately, demanding to be the centre of attention and overwhelming her students rather than teaching them. Her passion for the operatic roles she is teaching and her unrivalled understanding of them are awesome. The play chooses roles that cleverly reflect the real-life situations and emotions of Maria Callas herself. Does the student want to sing Verdi’s Lucia di Lammermoor? Callas can show her exactly how to pour into this role all the despair and misery of a woman abandoned by her lover, suffering as she suffered when Aristotle Onassis left her to marry Jackie Kennedy. Does the student want to study the role of Lady Macbeth? Again, Callas can show her exactly how to see into the mind and soul of a woman driven by ambition, an ambition so all-consuming that she will let nothing stand in her way, and feels that she could truly kill to get to the top. In the poverty of war-time Greece, under Nazi occupation, the young Maria struggled to study music and dedicated herself to mastering the soprano repertoire even when she could not afford food. The play includes several lengthy reveries in which Callas goes back into her past and acts the role of Onassis as well as her own, an ingenious way of telling us those parts of the story. In other reveries we follow her to the stage of La Scala and hear the recorded voice of Maria Callas singing. All of these experiences combine to create the formidable woman we see before us. As a teacher she is utterly unreasonable, uncompromising and heedless of wounding tender egos. She cares only about art and exhorts them to give everything, repeating the words of Lucia “Ho detto tutto…” (I have given everything.) This is an extraordinarily long and demanding role for Stephanie Beacham, and she carries it off to a quite impressive degree. She deserved a standing ovation. At the end of the play, we feel that we have met Maria Callas; we have gained an insight into the immense drive and compulsion that took her to the top, and the high price she had to pay for it. I would definitely recommend this play to anyone who is interested in opera, music, art, show-biz, the 1960s or even just stardom and celebrity as a phenomenon. There may be opera-haters out there who will not find the subject to their taste, but I found it enthralling. Julia Gasper. Master Class is showing at the Playhouse until next Saturday. http://www.oxfordplayhouse.com/ | ||
Home PREMIUM BONDS JACKPOT DRAW Oxford Business Directory Oxford Today News Oxford event proves companies will grow 10x in a year CENTRAL LONDON FABIAN SOCIETY Coco Noir Oxford Policy Site Map About Us |
Copyright 2008. All Rights Reserved.