Master Class
The Ensemble Theatre is certainly ‘on a roll’. First night audiences have been leaping to their feet right, left and centre. The last few productions have indeed featured some exceptional acting and, though Master Class may not hit the heights as a play, it has plenty of great theatrical moments played to the absolute hilt by Lucia Mastrantone as Greek opera singer Maria Callas.
American Terrence McNally wrote the 1996 award-winning play, based on master classes that Callas conducted at New York’s Julliad School of Arts toward the end of her career in the early 70s.
It’s pretty much a one-woman-show. With a supporting cast of five – a pianist, stagehand and three aspiring opera singers – Mastrantone nevertheless runs things her way, delivers her opinions and chats directly to the audience throughout. And we understand pretty quickly that the Callas way of performing opera (and living life) is the only way.
After getting prepared (‘Where is my cushion, my foot stool, my water???’) she meets the three students due to receive one-on-one tuition. First is Sophie (Bridget Patterson), young and enthusiastic, who is stopped after her first syllable. ‘Don’t act. Feel! BE!’ yells the tutor. ‘It’s all in the music!’
This student, and all the others, is accompanied on the piano by Maria Alfonsine, who plays brilliantly throughout.
Then comes the first of two sections of increasingly dark memories: Callas’s weight problems as a youngster, her sister’s intrusion, her early days in the theatre.
After the interval we meet her second student, big tenor Matthew Reardon, who manages to impress the great teacher with his singing.
Then victim number three, soprano Sharon Graham, excellently played by Elisa Colla, who has initially fled after being mercilessly criticised for her dress, but who now confronts her teacher before grasping how to sing (and act) the letter scene from Verdi’s Lady Macbeth.
Then it’s a return to Callas’s mixed memories of the man she left her husband Giovanni and her vibrant operatic career for – the Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, the one man she believed she’d found love with. Until he cleared off with Jackie Kennedy.
The techniques used here to dive into the Callas bag of troubling memories are brilliantly achieved under director Liesel Badorrek. The image of the larger-than-life, indestructible diva crumbles in front of our eyes. We are left with a lonely, bitter woman who has lived and breathed art but has never known true love.
Frank Hatherley
Photographer: Prudence Upton
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