A kiss for the leprous

Love and repulsion. It's a theme explored by Terrence McNally in his Broadway hit 'Masterclass', and 'A Perfect Ganesh', premiered this week in the UK. By Paul Taylor

Terrence McNally's Masterclass, the huge Broadway hit that will arrive in the West End next spring, seems to be turning into something of a bolthole for scarred refugees from Sunset Boulevard. The show - which takes as its framework the famous public teaching sessions conducted by Maria Callas at the Juilliard in the early Seventies - currently stars Patti Lupone, who created the role of Norma Desmond in the world premiere in London of Sunset but who was, famously, passed over in favour of Glenn Close for its New York unveiling. And who should be about to play Callas in the US national tour of Masterclass but one Faye Dunaway who, even more famously, was dropped before her Norma Desmond trod so much as a board?

McNally, a prolific, open and sweet-natured fiftysomething, has been over here this week to attend previews of the British premiere at the West Yorkshire Playhouse of A Perfect Ganesh, his 1993 play which sends two middle-class, middle-aged American women (played, in Jude Kelly's production, by Prunella Scales and Eleanor Bron) on a passage to India. He remarks, of the traffic between Sunset and Masterclass, that it's "utter coincidence", though "obviously both parts demand a certain kind of diva quality".

Indeed, McNally, a fully paid-up Callas freak who once put two fully paid-up Callas freaks centre stage in his play The Lisbon Traviata, says that, back in the Seventies, he used to joke when people asked him what the retired operatic superstar was now up to: "Oh, she's doing a Broadway musical of Sunset Boulevard." In The Queen's Throat, Wayne Koestenbaum's over-the-top meditation on opera queens and the queens of opera, he points up the affinities: "In legend [Callas] became Norma Desmond, unable to bear very much reality, dreaming of impossible comebacks." From Norma to Norma Desmond: it makes perfect sense.

The first actress to don the black pants suit and severe reading glasses that were Callas's uniform in those Juilliard masterclasses was Zoe Caldwell, who also created the role of Katherine in A Perfect Ganesh. Able to assume any guise at will and at peace with all things, the Ganesh of the title is the golden Hindu elephant god who is the spiritual hub around which the play spins. The elaborations caused by this central device can sometimes be a little confusing - after all, it's not every day of the week that you are asked to contemplate a Hindu elephant god in drag as a kimonoed Japanese matron. But the broad function of this somewhat Puck-like figure is clearer.

There's a playful irresponsibility in the character that may, we seem invited to suppose, betoken a deeper wisdom. Both the American women have lost sons. Katherine is haunted by Walter, the son she rejected because he was homosexual, who died, after a brutal gay bashing, in a New York hospital 20 minutes before she arrived. His fate is in cruelly ironic contrast, then, to that of Ganesh, whose violent death by decapitation at the hands of his father is followed by reconciliation and renewal when the father repents and decrees that the boy shall regain life by acquiring the head of the next creature that crosses his path. Yet in the scene where the women attend a puppet-show version of this story, Ganesh keeps sneakily replacing his own name with that of Walter. A supreme example of cruel tactlessness or an artful way of goading Katherine out of the stalled-in-the-past stagnancy of her feelings on this subject?

It was meeting two American women on a train in Rajasthan some 10 years ago that inspired A Perfect Ganesh. "I was just taken with the idea of two women who had left their husbands and children and the security and safety of a planned trip to Bermuda to travel through India." For a single man, it's adventurous enough. It's a play that wryly and unsneeringly acknowledges the limits to people's capacity for change, when faced with new experience. Wanting to love what repels her, in atonement for her treatment of Walter, Katherine naively plans to go out and kiss the leprous hordes of Bombay. But confronted with an actual specimen, she makes do with giving him a 50 rupee note. On the other hand, the drama also recognises that trips have a way of going on inside people after they are over.

A Perfect Ganesh played its part in prompting Masterclass. At a tribute to McNally at the Manhattan Theatre Club, Zoe Caldwell delivered one of Katherine's speeches on the same bill with Nathan Lane, who performed a chunk of The Lisbon Traviata, a play about frighteningly clued-up opera queens who worship La Divina. Instead of listening to the tributes, "I started writing Masterclass on the paper tablecloth," says McNally.

It was an exceedingly lucrative brainwave. Entering its second year on Broadway, the play is now being produced all over the world from Italy to Iceland. It's not hard to see why. More star vehicle than drama, it offers the right actress an extended opportunity for diva display. The show pushes to an extreme that sense you can get, even in the finest of masterclasses, that the focus of the exercise is the celebrated maestro not the aspiring students who are reduced, at worst, to sacrificial victims.

McNally, who attended Callas's classes and was himself the first teacher of playwriting at the Juilliard, insists that his play is "not a documentary" - and just how far that is the case can be judged from a three-CD set from EMI of excerpts from the actual sessions. True, Callas could be direct, as when she reproves a girl for wearing a short skirt to class, but this is done with due considerateness. In the show, her faux-guileless put- downs and attention-seeking gambits put you in mind of Dame Edna Everage. This epic self-absorption keeps carrying the proceedings away from the students' efforts into fevered interior monologue, underscored with Callas's own recorded singing voice.

It is almost impossible to speak of this diva's career without lapsing into B-movie camp, as Koestenbaum does when he writes that "her life was a mess and she was a goddess... Her operatic performances seemed real; her real life seemed operatic". Presenting her achievements as a kind of sado- masochistic revenge and her pact with Onassis as Macbeth-like in its unholiness, McNally's Callas has a good old wallow in more of the same. What she possessed, she announces, is "something that can't be taught or passed on or copied or even talked about", which there are surely more tactful places to break to people than in a teaching session.

Monstres don't come more sacres than this, and it's very enjoyable to watch, even if you feel that the word "exhibition" might be more appropriate than "drama" to describe what is on offer. When I saw the show in New York shortly after it opened, I was surprised to notice Diana Rigg sitting three rows behind. Surprised, because she had just opened as Mother Courage at the National Theatre in London, and must have flown over on Concorde to fit Masterclass into her busy schedule. I shouldn't imagine she was the only English actress of her age group to go and size up the part. In fact, however, it is Patti Lupone who is currently earmarked to create the role in the London production.

Leonard Bernstein once asked McNally if he had any ideas for a musical. "I said, The Phantom of the Opera, to which Bernstein's response was, 'That is the worst fucking idea I ever heard in my life' ." Sunset, Phantom: getting there in his head, at least, before Lloyd Webber seems to have been a habit with McNally. He did, however, write the book for two Kander & Ebb musicals - The Rink (1984) and Kiss of the Spider Woman (1990) - and he is now the librettist of a new big-budget musical version of the Doctorow novel Ragtime, which comes from the team who wrote Once on this Island. The world premiere is in Toronto in December.

Meanwhile, there is a Paris opening of Masterclass, which is being directed by Roman Polanski. "I have a feeling that that's going to be a 'production' too. Maybe there'll be four Marias or the students will commit suicide backstage." McNally sounds intrigued by the prospect.

'A Perfect Ganesh' is at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds (0113 2442111) to 7 Dec