The smart, feisty and often wonderfully funny play pits the wits and endurance of a celebrated artist against the meagre, desperate striving of a journalist who is slightly out of his depth. In anIndieWire podcastinterview about his film, Dune: Part Two, director Denis Villeneuve spoke about having witnessed Timothée Chalamet’s transformation over the years spent working with him into a full-blown movie star. He said he’d noticed that the young actor had made a choice very early in his career, essentially to forsake a “normal life” in order to be an artist of a certain calibre.
It’s a decision, Villeneuve noted, that requires extraordinary sacrifice. The Opera Singer, a play that opened recently at the Baxter’s intimate upstairs Studio theatre, to large extent examines the nature of such sacrifice, grappling with the idea that great artists are – for better or worse – called to their craft and must in many ways lay down their lives at the altar of success. The play is a clever, resourceful two-hander, most of which takes place in a single room in the home of an opera diva, in many ways modelled onMaria Callas.
Its action revolves around a conversation between herself and a young, ineffectual journalist who had fallen in love with her as a boy, perhaps even harboured hopes of becoming an opera singer just like her. But the journalist is not there to sing her praise, but rather to interview her and – he hopes – extract her secrets, get to the real person beneath the famous exterior. It’s an unfair match, really, and the perfect conceit for a fun, funny and ultimately bittersweet punch-up between a superstar artist at the end of her career and a bitterly inept journalist getting his first real break as someone with a professional interest in writing about people.
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Writer-director Janna Ramos-Violante has hinted that her intention with The Opera Singer was to some extent to look at the nature of journalism as a kind of fundamentally exploitative activity, one in which the journalist is always to some extent preying upon the world and the people in it who actually make it go round. As the battle of wits unfolds the diva reminds the journalist that she has led a hugely significant life that has made her supremely famous; the obituary journalist who has arrived at her home to interview her has accomplished nothing, which is one reason he promptly folds in the aura of her greatness. What’s meant to be a dredging up of all this opera singer’s secrets in fact ends up revealing far more about the journalist: he reveals everything from the sad circumstances of his birth to the reasons he keeps mentioning his grandmother, and as much as he knows he’s not there to talk about himself, he is almost unable to keep himself from opening up in the presence of this great force of nature.
And a force of nature she truly is, not only able to demonstrate in short shrift that she would probably make a better journalist than the one who has come to interview her, but repeatedly driving home another point that seems to underscore the play: those who can, do; those who can’t, write. Not only does she expose his failings as an interviewer, she early on gives him a dressing down for possessing the wrong name. Although he’s called Theo, she tells him he should have a more bookish name, just one of many (rather funny) moments in which she uses her biting tongue and ability to instantly assess a person, to summarily put the young man in his place.
At the same time, of course, she shows him – and the audience – that she does not suffer fools lightly. In this case, though, the young and foolish journalist, played with wide-eyed innocence and a serious dollop of breathless incompetence with absolutely spot-on accuracy by the perfectly cast Owain Rhys Davies, can barely get the basics of his profession straight. He’s not only terrible at his job (admittedly, it’s the first time he’s been assigned to write about a living person rather than dredge up facts about the deceased), but he commits the grievous sin of being a fawning devotee of the great personage he’s interviewing, and the even worse sin of hoping to be liked by her.
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