The Stage

Master Class

Published Wednesday 8 February 2012 at 09:32 by Mark Shenton

Terrence McNally’s Master Class, a play that recreates a public teaching session by the late, great opera star Maria Callas, first came to the West End’s Queen’s Theatre in 1997, after its Tony-winning triumph on Broadway the year before. That production marked Patti LuPone’s first return to London after the debacle of her ignominious firing from Sunset Boulevard four years earlier. One magnificent, wronged diva was playing another but, sad to say, it didn’t mark a homecoming triumph for either of them - the show closed after just six weeks.

Tyne Daly ( Maria Callas) and Naomi O' Connell (Sharon Graham) in Master Class at the Vaudeville Theatre Photo: Johan Persson

Now a fresh attempt is being made to bring the play to London audiences, via last year’s successful Broadway revival starring Tyne Daly. And she’s in stunning form - with her painted eyebrows permanently arched as if caught in a simultaneous sense of surprise and disdain, she cuts an imperious and fascinating figure. She definitely has “a look”, to quote the advice or accusation she levies at others - including a couple of audience members - whom she suggests don’t have it.

“There are no shortcuts in art,” she tells one student, but McNally’s play provides her with some to get the audience’s sympathy, with some comic zingers to reveal the playful, self-aware side to a person unafraid to be seen as a commanding, demanding monster. Creating great art, or being a conduit for it, comes at a price. The irony of McNally’s play about the pain and cost of doing so is that the playwright has not created any himself, but this efficient, effective star vehicle nevertheless articulates the personal losses associated with that pursuit with a moving and intense clarity.

It is spellbindingly performed by Daly, and though no one could turn the cramped but cosy Vaudeville into La Scala, Stephen Wadsworth’s production switches between the intimacy of a classroom seminar and a large operatic stage with an effective immediacy.

Daly is also superbly joined by Dianne Pilkington, Naomi O’Connell and Garrett Sorenson as the three pupils she variously intimidates and terrorises.