THEATRE REVIEW: Getting to grips with a diva: Sandra Prinsloo plays Maria Callas in ‘Master Class’

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To mark the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Maria Callas, Sandra Prinsloo is playing the temperamental opera diva in Terrence McNally’s award-winning play that poses questions about the nature of art while revealing both the magic and ...

On a bright, characteristically wind-blasted summer’s day in Cape Town, actress Sandra Prinsloo was on stage for a technical rehearsal of Terrence McNally’s 1995 play,It was one week before the show’s opening on 22 February and the cast, having just made the move from the rehearsal room to the theatre, were finding their feet: familiarising themselves with the physical dimensions of the stage, getting to grips with the bright lights, adapting to the weird acoustics, and – on this particular day...

As the director sought to fine-tune spotlight positions, music cues and placements, not to mention the number of steps that could be safely taken during a speech before someone could accidentally fall off stage because the footlights were so blindingly bright, Prinsloo popped in and out of character, up and down a vast emotional range, with imperceptible ease.Even during this slightly manic stop-start-pause-rewind rehearsal, Callas was well and truly under Prinsloo’s skin.

In other moments, she’s heartbreakingly tender, her own pains and foibles stirringly revealed. At its heart, though, the play is almost a sermon about the dedication required to become a great artist, someone who reaches beyond natural talent and training, someone who devotes the entirety of their being to the craft.Callas’s dedication to her art was, it’s revealed, all-consuming.

In her more recent one-woman shows, she has navigated the tricky psychology of dementia and has had to examine what it means to accept death as a natural consequence of life. There is such tenderness in Prinsloo’s manner, such a grasp of Callas the human being, of someone who is so much more than her larger-than-life public persona might let on.What makes Prinsloo so easy to watch and such a potent presence on stage is perhaps down to “being in the moment”, that skill great actors possess of stepping so completely into the skin of their characters that they are able to transport the audience to another time and place, to let us experience another reality.

 

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