Lloyd Evans
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Her devotion to her craft is obsessive. She scolds a struggling soloist for failing to enunciate both ‘t’s in Macbetto. The asides about her colleagues, ‘Joan Sutherland — a 12-foot Lucia de Lammermoor’, are hilarious but this sort of backstage bitchery can only take us so far. We need meat. So the script plunders her life history and comes up with a medley of Dear Diary entries, which are glued, rather creakily, to the structure. Callas tells us about the war (it was tough), her early career (she was fat), her stardom (she loved it), her first marriage (he was old), her second marriage (he was rich and rude and dumped her for Jackie), her loneliness (it was tough, again, like the war), but she reveals nothing we haven’t heard before. In tackling Callas’s musical genius, the show takes a risk. She gives a running commentary on her greatest arias as they’re being belted out over the loudspeakers.
Callas on Callas should be fascinating. But this doubling up turns it into Callas versus Callas. It hardly works. A finale is needed and the script creates a bust-up with a truculent young soprano whose abrasive self-confidence Callas warms to. Pretty contrived, really, but it carries the show, staggering a little, to the final curtain.
Tyne Daly, the star, is a surprise package. In the 1980s she was one half of Cagney and Lacey, although no one can remember which half, not even Cagney or Lacey. She captures Callas’s self-pitying flamboyance easily enough, prowling the stage, all scary eyebrows, big hair and darting black eyes. Even her cheekbones seem to tremble with majestic accusation. But she’s at her tiptop best in the earlier sections where she shows herself to be a great light-touch comedian. An all-rounder, in fact. And that’s what’s required. The trouble with Master Class is that it’s constrained by its medium. The stage is too inflexible for the range of genres it wants to explore. It’s a BBC 4 drama-doc in the wrong berth. And I’m not convinced it’ll find a London audience. If you’re entertaining a party of gay Greek–American Verdi-loving comedy buffs in the coming weeks, it’s the only show in town.
You may have heard the view that the Barbican is a cultural labour camp where art is murdered in secret. I’ve seen a few atrocities there myself so I was rather dreading The Devil and Mr Punch by puppet ensemble Improbable. The performers are hidden behind a vast wooden screen like an intricate wardrobe full of flaps and hidden peep-holes. The plot is kiddy-simple. Mr Punch kills his wife, is arrested, tried and descends into hell.
The approach is straightforward Edwardian pastiche with a knowing nod to postmodernism as prerehearsed technical cock-ups emerge. A cue is missed or a prop slips. ‘Oh, fuck,’ we hear. Idiot boards help us with the plot. ‘The Chase’ is announced with the ‘The’ upside-down. The humour level is lower than Norfolk’s water table. Kids wouldn’t enjoy any of this. (They’d be bored or disturbed.) It’s not suitable for adults either.
But it’s absolutely ideal for unemployable mime artists. Occasionally they emerge from their oaken hidey-hole and show us their mettle with clowning routines and funny speeches. They’re the kind of performers who mistake excitability for charm, gesticulation for acting, bellowing for lyricism, and the desire to appear in front of an audience for the ability to amuse one. If you passed them on the street — and that may happen quite soon — you wouldn’t give them a second look. It’s amazing that six grown-ups with a budget can produce a show whose chief aim is to cram as little possible into 105 minutes. If Britain were run by fascist commissars this sort of nostalgic olde worlde fob-watch-and-weskit frippery would be the only art the state would tolerate. I wonder where it’s heading next. Probably Poundbury.
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