CHRIS THURMAN: A portrait of the enigmatic ‘La Divina’

What happens when a life is transplanted? Some people flourish in their new surroundings. Some wither. Some take on new characteristics and may even give the appearance of being a different organism altogether, even though they still yearn for the soil in which they were first nourished.

But nostalgia, the longing to be connected to one’s former home — one’s former self — often fails to yield the bittersweet pleasure we associate with that word. Rather, living in the past usually entails a painful and obsessive return to foundational traumas. The result is a double displacement from the present: a literalising of LP Hartley’s formulation that “the past is a foreign country”.

This recursive impulse is at the core of Master Class, the 1995 play by Terence McNally now enjoying a revival in SA, which depicts ageing diva Maria Callas giving hit-and-miss instruction to young opera hopefuls. Starring Sandra Prinsloo and a handful of performers from Cape Town Opera, this production also demonstrates what happens when stories are transplanted — and not only from one place to another, but also across time.

Callas was a colossal presence in the opera world of the 1950s and 1960s. There were purists who disdained her, finding her vocal interpretations too idiosyncratic and severe, at odds with the bel canto tradition. The consensus among musicologists, however, is that her genius was to innovate through immersion in, rather than deviation from, the style and vision of the composer whose music she was singing.

In Master Class, Callas’s advice to young artists is encapsulated in a credo that borrows the German word for courage: “Discipline. Technique. Mut.” A number of the aphorisms she offers about art and what it means to be an artist are contradictory, or at least paradoxical (“art is about domination ... and collaboration”). By emphasising discipline, technique and bravery, however, she is really telling us about how she rose to the top.

Hers is a story of migration: born in New York to Greek immigrants, shipped as an adolescent back to Athens, making her mark in the glamorous opera houses of Italy, travelling the globe and returning to New York to teach at the Juilliard School as her star faded (she would spend her final years in Paris before dying at the age of 53).

Even at the height of her fame — which was arguably after the peak of her vocal prowess — Callas continued to wrestle with the misery of her childhood and youth. It almost seems scripted: the absent father, the unloving and overbearing mother, the onset of World War 2 while she was studying in Greece, the privation and sacrifice that followed (“you had to choose between having an orange and having a pencil”).

McNally interweaves these recollections with other, more recent memories — recent, that is, to Callas in the latter stages of her life. She was generally unhappy in love, and this romantic trajectory culminated in an affair with shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, who by all accounts mistreated her throughout their on-again, off-again relationship.

When some stories travel through time, they lose their influence or become less recognisable. So it was with Callas, who was one of the great post-war celebrities yet has become less known in each subsequent generation. McNally’s play sparked renewed interest in her life and work when it premiered, and has done so with various new iterations since then. Now it presents SA audiences with an opportunity to discover, or rediscover, this enigmatic figure.

There is nonetheless a risk that even the larger-than-life Callas could be overshadowed by the actress interpreting the part. Sandra Prinsloo’s place in the pantheon of great SA theatre-makers is already assured; unlike Callas, she is not an artist about whom opinion is divided.

In this production, however, Prinsloo is kept on her toes by a vocal-theatrical dance with the Cape Town Opera performers. The result is a hybrid of words and music — and images, with projected footage of Callas on- and offstage comprising a key component of the storytelling — that creates a composite portrait of La Divina.

• Master Class is at Theatre on the Bay until 11 March and at Montecasino from 15 March to 2 April.