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Masterclass

Amanda Muggleton plays the star role as Maria Callas teaching a masterclass at New York's Juiliard in 1975.
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Image: Amanda Muggleton as Maria Callas in Masterclass. Photo (c) Kate Ferguson.

Terence McNally’s 1995 play Masterclass has been consistently in theatres throughout Europe and the US since its date of completion in 1995 and now the play has returned to Melbourne – to a very popular season at the MTC Lawler studio.

Grand dame of Australia’s acting establishment, Amanda Muggleton, plays the star role as Maria Callas teaching a masterclass at New York’s Juiliard in 1975. As Callas strides around the stage with a mixture of imperiousness and childish petulance, sparkling with splashes of diamonds on her black trouser suit, her inner emotional world emerges over the next two hours through asides to the audience, comments to the young opera singers she is coaching, and mutterings to herself.

Muggleton has been playing this role since the late 90s and displays an ease and confidence that is much needed (and carries a play that often lacks direction and theatrical intensity). Nonetheless, the audience is taken deeper into the world of the opera singer and how opera facilitated Callas’ escape from difficult times. Interspersed with the original recordings of Callas, the music becomes freshly accessible and new attention can be paid with Callas’  stern admonition ‘people have forgotten how to listen, they are not concentrating’ making the audience sit up and listen.

Callas is portrayed by the playwright as an unstable, narcissistic but likeable artist struggling with unresolved inner turmoil while harnessing the world of opera as her indisputable field of power. Images of the young Callas are projected on the stage backdrop to bring her further to life. However, McNally’s writing fails to penetrate  the veneer of prima donna that Callas presents; her complexity is simplified with her inner struggle reduced to her relationship with her desirability and her famous failed love affairs. The students who come to see her are two dimensional and stiffly played. McNally’s writing comes abruptly to life in the crude aggressive words Callas uses to mimic her husband Onassis (the greek tycoon who would late marry Jackie Kennedy). Mcnally’s portrayal of the masculine is more convincing.

Actor Dobbs Franks performs as a fine counterpart to Muggleton. Before the performance begins he emerges through the stage door and gently  introduces himself to the front row by offering his hand and enquiry, like a maitre di welcoming his customers. A further playfulness with theatrical artifice is seen at at the closing of the play when Muggleton lets the character of Callas slip, drops the accent, and happily promotes the three young opera singers inviting  them to sing live pieces. Jessica Boyd’s technical prowess, passion and comical zeal shines in the Mozart she sings. Kala Gare sings Puccini with imploring sweetness and Tom Dalton reveals a tenor voice that hold the auditorium in reverent silence.

Masterclass does not reveal the technical side of the operatic art, however it does pose the question of where must true feeling be sourced from in a performer for them to inhabit a character; to reveals one’s suffering lifts the technical accomplished perfomance up into the realm of breath-stopping.

Callas describes the role of the opera singer as the one who ‘feels for the audience and is left empty’. Burnt out and cracked voiced, there is the tragedy that she will die at 53 largely alienated from the artistic community. She emphasised the importance of a good entrance for setting up the success of an engagement; such pieces of her observation reveal that she was not only a great singer but a fascinating and charismatic teacher. 

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Masterclass

Starring Amanda Muggleton as Maria Callas
Director Adam Spreadbury-Maher, The King’s Head Theatre London 
with
Dobbs Franks as Emmanuel “Manny” Weinstock, Accompanist
Kala Gare as Sophie De Palma, First Soprano
Jessica Boyd as Sharon Graham, Second Soprano
Rocco Speranza as Anthony “Tony” Candolino, Tenor

Amelia Swan
About the Author
Melbourne-based art writer and historian.