First staged in 1946, Filumena Marturano is a smart comic play written by celebrated Neapolitan playwright, director and actor Eduardo De Filippo. With a long and successful track record in the theatre and on screen, this new reading of the work re-interrogates the relationship between Domenico Soriano (played by Italian actor Enrico Ianniello) and Filumena Marturano (played by Catalan actress Clara Segura).
The setting is Naples in the post-war period, a place where men with money make the rules and the complicity of women is both expected and relied upon. Domenico Soriano is a wealthy confectioner whose business runs thanks to Filumena Marturano, a working-class woman and former prostitute who has been his romantic partner, employee and housekeeper for twenty-five years. The unmarried couple reach a crisis point right at the beginning of the play as Soriano has decided to marry Diana, a woman half his age. Filumena responds with a last-gasp attempt to hang on to this well-established relationship of... if not love, then convenience.
Born in Caserta, a city not far from Naples, Erico Ianniello is in his element as Domenico, a sniffy spoilt pup of a patriarch with a predilection for racing horses and chasing skirts. The play trips successfully between the Italian, Spanish, Catalan and Neapolitan languages, keeping things moving along, while also interrogating the notion of communication itself with words becoming embellishments to actions. Opposite him, Clara Segura's Filumena seems stiff and uncertain: out of place, out of sorts, rigid with repression or with rage.
Even before the war, Naples had been one of Italy’s poorest cities. Bombing wiped out infrastructure and supply lines, leaving the population desperate. The Camorra, an organised crime group, rose to prominence, helping to establish a vast black market and maintaining a stranglehold on Neapolitan businesses. Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels show female characters persistently struggling with this claustrophobic context.
The success of multiple past performances and film adaptations of Filumena Marturano are all directed by men – including this one, by Oriol Broggi – but are credited to the female leads. This began in 1946 with the author’s sister Titina De Filippo, for whom he wrote the part (he even played Domenico opposite her). When the premiere was met with a lukewarm response, the famous Neapolitan actress rewrote the role and received a rapturous reception. Subsequent versions rely too on the clout of its female star: they include a 1950 Argentinian musical film starring Tita Merello, and a 1964 Italian adaption starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni, annoyingly titled Marriage Italian Style, in which Loren presides with wide-eyed zeal. The hopeless, handsome male and the hot, conniving female archetype runs through further adaptations. An English-language version in 1977 directed by Franco Zeffirelli starred Joan Plowright, and Dame Judi Dench played the role in 1998. (Interestingly, in early 2023, the Azerbaijani State Academic National Drama Theater put on its adaptation of the play.)
If gendered passion seems required to pull off Filumena, then Segura declines to show it. There seems, as such, little chemistry between the protagonists, with the funniest (and warmest) scene in the play a Domenico-led 'game of sons' in which Filumena is notably absent. But the direction, the scene setting, and the individual performances are superb, and the reflections made about the play and the couple's relationship in its interpretation are important and necessary ones.
