Monica Bellucci: Maria Callas “Letters and Memoirs” at Her Majesty’s Theatre, London.
Star rating: two stars ★ ★ ✩ ✩ ✩
Probably the most famous opera singer of her generation, Maria Callas (1923-1977) had terrific vocal power and charisma but we don’t get much sense of that in Monica Bellucci’s account of Albin Michel’s book Lettres & mémoires.
Bellucci is a model turned actor and models don’t smile. Neither does her Callas. For over an hour she speaks slowly, carefully and with anguish while we are told the source of her words – letters to her husband, teacher, Aristotle Onassis, Grace Kelly and various friends – on a projected back screen.
It’s very static piece of theatre based on a sofa. At one point she lies on it and at another she walks round it – and that’s the sum total of the action.
Her delivery is, ironically, all on one note although she looks the part – tall, slender with magnificent bone structure and dressed in Callas trademark black. There is no humour or variety in mood.
The point of the piece, I suppose, is that Callas in her life time was much maligned for her private life and here we hear her account in her own words. It’s pretty disjointed, though. One minute she’s being born in New York in 1923 and the next she’s performing in Athens under fire in 1941 without any explanation of how she got from one to the other.
Of course you can’t make a biopic about an opera singer without hearing her sing and we are treated to a series of famous Callas recordings of her key moments in, for example Verdi, Bellini and Wagner. And that’s quite moving.
Whenever the actress stops talking and the music starts the lights dim so that she is in darkness but the brass horn gramophone beside the sofa is spotlit.
That looks dramatic but it’s stretching a point. By the 1950s when Callas was at her peak, even horn-less wind-up gramophones were old hat and many people were acquiring radiograms.
Susan Elkin
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