A very angry Matthew Kelly storms the stage in anguish. He is playing Domenico Soriano – a rich Italian who has just been fooled into marrying the woman he has lived with for 35 years.
Felicity Kendal absolutely steals the show as the woman who pretends to be on her death bed to get her lover to marry her – because she wants her sons to have his name – and also to see off a young woman he thinks he is going to marry after her imminent death.
Filumena is a girl from Naples so poor that as a teenager, she thought the brothel she went to work in was a palace. She speaks about growing up so poor she was dazzled by seeing girls wearing dresses that only they had worn.
She describes sharing a bed with her brothers and sisters, not having shoes and always, always being hungry.
How did you get those clothes, how did you get that food, she had asked the girls in the dresses. “This is what you do,” they had said. The brothel was the answer.
Felicity Kendal has long, long speeches in this play by Eduardo de Filippo, translated from the Italian by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall. She is the complete mistress of them, They are moving and memorable. She quietly and subtly acts everyone else off the stage.
As we hear, Filumena cannot read. That world is closed to her. But she has charm and steely determination. We learn that she has had three sons – all brought up by other people – but now grown men who do not know they are brothers.
Due to her artfulness, they have wanted for nothing, and each is successful in his own sphere.
One of the sons is Domenico’s – but she wants all of them to have his name. She will never tell him which one because she wants all of them to be treated equally. By the second act he has succumbed to her wishes and is marrying her after all – begging her to say which boy is his. Tormented by not knowing.
De Filippo wrote the play in 1946. It is about family, and it is about masculine pride and how a clever woman can make her way through life – despite how few choices she really has. How a man may think he is the boss but isn’t really – if you have nothing, you can learn to be artful.
There is a lot of humour in it – but it would be much, much funnier in Italian -and somehow truer. The male characters are supposed to be beguiling despite their failings, like Joey in the American sitcom Friends.
Delivered with English accents their flaws just seem cold and sordid. The culture of Naples is very much a character in the play. A lot is lost here in translation and some of the actors deliver the lines as if they are translating and we feel we have too much exposition.
Directed by Sean Mathias and with a stunning set of an Italian Palazzo by Morgan Large, the play is engaging but lacks the warmth and vitality it deserves.
Filumena is at Cambridge Arts Theatre until Saturday, November 9.
ALL PHOTOS: Jack Merriman
