“Filumena” at Theatre Royal, Bath
Simon Thomas in South West England
14 November 2024
Theatre Royal Bath plays host to a touring production of Eduardo De Filippo’s sunny mid-career comedy Filumena, bringing a blast of Southern Italian heat to the West Country on a chilly November evening.
Photo credit: Jack Merriman.
Written in 1946, Filumena comes from a long tradition of Italian comedy that can be traced back at least as far as Carlo Goldoni’s late plays at the end of the 18th century. These progressive comedies cast forward a good hundred years to the advent of naturalism, while retaining something of the stock types of the commedia dell’arte. As such, the archetypes can be seen in De Filippo’s work: the toothless old man chasing after young girls, the putta onorata (honourable whore), a comic maid, loyal housekeeper, flirtatious young woman, comedy lawyer, and so on. To these he adds three burly sons who don’t know each other and fall to fighting at their first meeting. It’s just the sort of scenario that Goldoni might have dreamed up.
Filumena Maturano is an ex-prostitute who has lived with wealthy Don Domenico Soriano for 25 years. He plans to marry the flighty Diana, one of a number of young women he has pursued over the years, so Filumena dreams up a scheme to keep him by feigning near-death. Believing he’ll soon be shot of her, he marries her an hour before the play begins. She immediately recovers to the arrogant old man’s apoplectic rage and then reveals to him that she has three sons (an accountant, a shirtmaker, and a plumber) who she loves and wants to care for. She’s been ripping off Don Domenico for years to support the youngsters. Her trickery derives from an honourable desire to do the best for the family and she’s ready to back away once the scheme goes awry. Adding another layer of laughter and intrigue, she tells him that he is the father of one of the three boys but refuses to say which.
De Filippo gives the characters long speeches, during which they tell us their histories, as well as some boisterous physical comedy that gets quite broad at times. At the centre of the piece is a delightful Felicity Kendal, extracting all the comedy and pathos from the character in her sparring with Matthew Kelly’s blustery old man. It’s a real war of opposites, laced with a love that transcends any temporary infatuations. Sean Mathias’s production is full of energetic Italianate flourishes, bordering on the cod, with perhaps a little too much hand waving at times, but preferable to too English an approach.
There are great set pieces, which could be seen as a development of the traditional commedia lazzi (bits of crowd-pleasing business that the performers intersperse with the storyline). In particular, Don Domenico’s third-act attempt to winkle out of the three boys which one of them is his is masterful. Each proves himself as lustful as the Don with penchants for poetry and song, just like him, leaving the old man bewildered and none the wiser.
Mathias uses a snippet of La traviata as beginning and end of scene music, pointing to the fact that the play has an almost operatic quality. Had it been written a decade or two earlier, it might have made it to the opera stage by way of the likes of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, who composed several operas from similar material (including several Goldonis).
The supporting cast are top-notch, with some fine comic timing from Jamie Hogarth’s Alfredo, Sarah Twomey’s scatty maid Lucia, a wheedling pretender for the Don’s hand by Jodie Steel, and a hapless brief-case clutching avvocato in Ben Nealon. The three sons are well balanced: the bookish Umberto (Gavin Fowler), oafish straggly-haired Riccardo (Fabrizio Santino), and cheerfully hen-pecked Michele (George Banks). A special mention is reserved for Julie Legrand’s faithful old housekeeper Rosalia, who helps guide Filumena through the ups and downs of trying (and finally succeeding) in marrying and re-marrying Don Domenico.
Morgan Large’s set and costume designs set just the right tone for a mid-twentieth-century Neapolitan setting. This is a quality production of a big-hearted comedy with serious undertones of law, love, and relationships. Following the Bath run, Filumena will play Richmond Theatre (19-23 November), having opened at Windsor last month.
