Filumena. PiccadillyEnter Michael Pennington's Domenico in blue shirt and braces, all but knocking off his neat little moustache as he slaps his own face in furious indignation.
You wonder what has happened to derange him, and you soon get an answer. Judi Dench's Filumena, stringy grey-black hair dangling down her nightgown, stands there looking not just as if she has eaten the cream but has pots and pots of it in the larder. She is the ex-prostitute who has been Domenico's companion and on-and-off mistress for 25 years, and, by faking a death-bed scene, has conned him into marrying her.
Most dramatists would have given us that wedding in all its jokiness. Not the great Neopolitan playwright, Eduardo de Filippo. His Filumena is often funny, but he shuns easy hilarity for serious, sometimes sombre comedy. The play comes from a city and a time, 1946, where and when the matters it involves had a significance half-lost in 1998 Britain. Here marriage, paternity, love are mountains with peaks and chasms, not overweening molehills.
I hesitate to reveal much of the plot, for de Filippo, who died in 1984, took craftsmanly delight in timing his surprises; but I must. Filumena coolly informs the still-raging Domenico she has three grown sons. And when he still insists on an annulment, she goes further. One of the young men is his - but which? John Gordon-Sinclair's confident, snooty shirtmaker? Jason Watkins's matey plumber? Or Laurence Mitchell's earnest, artistically inclined clerk?
Filumena isn't telling.
Even by Neopolitan standards the stakes are high; and though it refuses to replace the performers' English accents, Peter Hall's production never lets you forget this. There are amusing moments, as when Pennington seeks to discover which of the boys shares his traits, only to discover that all are, like him, woman-mad and, unlike him, tone-deaf. But Pennington catches the baffled pain, the resignation and finally the warmth demanded of him; and Dench is superb.
How unEnglish she seems, with her sandpaper voice, her wariness and slum defiance. When she tells Pennington she refused to abort her children, "but stole from you to bring them up", it is not a plea for understanding, but a ferocious boast; and when she promises to kill him if he reveals her secrets to them, her blunt, quiet tones leave him and us convinced she means it. When such a one softens and sobs, as eventually she does, it is no small matter. It is a gut-wrenching, throat-twisting denouement to a wonderfully wise play.
This article appeared in the The London Times on October 8, 1998.