Call your agent! Bellucci bombs in Callas-trophe
Maria Callas — Letters and Memoirs Her Majesty’s Theatre, SW1A ★✩✩✩✩
THERE’S an undeniable thrill at seeing Monica Bellucci, the arthouse bombshell who brought class and continental sensuality to the Bond and Matrix franchises, live on a London stage. But it dies almost instantly in this lamentable meander through the personal scribblings of postwar opera star Maria Callas. You could call it a Callas-trophe.
There’s little in this one-woman, oneoff show to interest anyone who isn’t already obsessively knowledgeable about the Greek-American soprano who stormed the classical world in the Fifties, preceded Jackie Kennedy in Aristotle Onassis’s favour, and died aged 53 in 1977. Bellucci, who deliciously spoofed her own sultry image in Call My Agent!, is spectacularly wooden and dull.
Statuesque in a black silk dress, hair scraped back but with garage-door eyelashes working overtime, she recites extracts from the singer’s letters and diaries in a breathy, languid monotone. The action largely consists of her moving from a standing to a seated to a reclining odalisque pose on gold sofa next to a gramophone on a rose-strewn stage. Callas’s words are projected behind and then over her, as recordings of famous arias give way to plangent piano music, signalling the decline of the diva’s voice.
My God, the source material is dull — a mix of self-pity, self-aggrandisement and banality. “I will become the queen of singing in Italy and maybe everywhere,” she tells her mentor in 1948. “I hope to see you and Rainiervery soon,” she tells Grace Kelly in 1965. “We can only count on ourselves,” she tells Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975.
Mainly, director Tom Volf wants to recast Callas as a martyr who sacrificed love, health and life to her gift, rather than the “tigress” of legend. In practice that just means another rehash of her professional and personal disasters.
Volf has created two books, an exhibition and a film about Callas but appears to have no notable previous theatre experience. Bellucci did some readings in Paris to support an anthology of Callas’s writings. Somehow the two of them came together to create this stultifying evening.
As a Bellucci fan, I was delighted to watch the curtain rise. Within minutes, I really, really thought that she should call her agent.