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by Eduardo De Filippo, translated by John Murrell, directed by Antoni Cimolino

Stratford Festival, Avon Theatre, Stratford

August 17-October 27, 2018

Spasiano: “Sooner or later everyone must knock on the door of another”

Although it opened last in the Festival’s schedule of openings, Napoli milionaria! now becomes the must-see play of the Stratford Festival season.  The richness of its realist portrayal of everyday life in Naples in the 1940s is amazing in its complexity of characters, storylines, imagery and emotions.  Dominating everything is Tom McCamus’s magnificent portrayal of the play’s central character Gennaro, which alone is reason enough to see this fascinating work.

Though unknown to most theatre-goers in North America, the author of Napoli, Eduardo De Filippo (1900-84), is regarded as the one of the great Italian playwrights of the 20th century.  He wrote plays and screen plays and acted in both media.  Napoli premiered in Naples on March 15, 1945, less than two months before VE Day (May 8), and thus gives us an unparalleled glimpse into what life was like in wartime Naples before and after the arrival of the American troops.  Antoni Cimolino directed another of De Filippo’s great works, Filumena Marturano (1946), at Stratford in 1997.  He has done everyone a great service by mounting a second De Filippo that reveals even more clearly what a great playwright he was. 

The play is divided into three acts with a long gap of time between Acts 1 and 2.  Act 1, set in 1942, has a generally comic tone, and introduces us to Gennaro Iovine, a former streetcar driver, and his family and friends.  There has been bombing overnight and everyone is sleepy and looking forward to a cup of coffee.  Gennaro’s wife Amalia (Brigit Wilson) is angry about the tactics used by her neighbour who, as she is, is involved in the black market sale of coffee.  Her main supplier is the truck driver Errico Settebellizze (Michael Blake), who tells people that Amalia is merely storing goods for him.  In fact, Amalia has an enormous range of goods all stored in and under her bed that range from coffee and beans to eggs and cheese.  Neighbours come to her and if she doesn’t have certain product, she says she can arrange to have it later.  One of her regular clients is the accountant Spasiano (Tom Rooney), who is already in debt to her for past purchases.  He notes that every time he buys something from Amalia it costs more than it did the time before, 

Gennaro, a World War I veteran who prides himself in being an honest man, is against his wife’s trade and wishes she would wind it down, but he understands that without it the family would go hungry.  He also is for anything that the fascists who run the country are against.  When word comes that the police sergeant Ciappa (André Sills) is coming to arrest Gennaro as head of the household where black market goods are stored and sold, the family stage an elaborate trick, reminiscent of the one in Puccini’s opera Gianni Schicchi (1919), to leave them alone.  Though Ciappa sees through the trick, he admires Gennaro for his audacity.

Act 2 begins more than a year after the events of Act 1 and the tone is more sombre.  The Allies, who first entered Naples on October 1, 1943, now occupy the town and southern Italy.  Gennaro has gone missing and Amalia has had no word from him since his disappearance.  The Iovines’ once dingy home of Act 1 is now filled with expensive furniture and a chandelier and Amalia is now well dressed and sports jewelry all due to her continued thriving black market trade.  Gennaro’s son, Amadeo (Johnathan Sousa), once a car mechanic, has begun making money by stealing tires with two of his friends.  Gennaro’s daughter Maria (Shruti Kothari), has got herself pregnant by an American soldier.  Gennaro’s youngest child, Rituccia lies deathly ill although Amalia’s friends persist in thinking it’s just growing pains.  Amalia’s lack of charity towards Spasiano is driving him into poverty.  Meanwhile, Amalia is preparing to celebrate Errico's birthday while he, who has always been attracted to Amalia, begins to pressure her to marry him, thinking that Gennaro must be dead.  Gennaro, however, is not dead, but returns that very day and is bewildered by what has happened to his wife and children.

What is so fascinating about the play is how De Filippo creates an onstage realism that thwarts our generic expectations.  Amalia and Amadeo are engaged in illicit activity in all three acts of the play, but what De Filippo has us regard as comic and wily in Act 1, we regard as serious and morally corrupt in Acts 2 and 3.  Two things have changed after Act 1.  The motivation of the activities of Amalia and Amadeo has changed from survival to greed, and, related to this, Gennaro, the moral centre of the play, has disappeared.  When he returns in Act 2 Gennaro brings with him a first-hand knowledge of war and sees how the ethos of war infects even those who are not fighting.  In the occupied city as in war, the attitude has become “every man for himself”.  Amalia’s exploitation and lack of pity for the accountant Spasiano  is the prime example of her loss of humanity.  Spasiano will later have to remind her that “Sooner or later everyone must knock on the door of another”. 

Thus in the marvellously complex realistic tapestry of life that De Filippo weaves, we see how we can both laugh and later deplore the same mentality depending on the circumstances in which it appears.  Gennaro is our guide having seen the real horrors of war in a way that his protected friends and family have not.  Gennaro has experience of the void, the ultimate context from which to view human activity and he sees, not unlike the later views of Albert Camus, that helping others is the only activity that can give life meaning.

Tom McCamus gives the performance of his career as Gennaro.  The way he presents the various levels Gennaro’s self-awareness is an amazing feat of acting.  In Act 1 he shows that Gennaro knows both that people make fun of his rants against the ways of the world but that they also respect him.  In Act 2 McCamus vividly depicts Gennaro’s stupefaction at being home again both because he thought for so long it would impossible and because his home is visibly not the

same as he left it.  McCamus masterfully delivers Gennaro’s long monologue about the wartime experiences he has had as if he were trying to purge his memory, with his pauses and repetitions only adding to the feeling that speaking of what he has seen only forces him to relive the trauma.  Cimolino beautifully directs the party scene where Gennaro as an unexpected guest is compelled to tell everyone he meets about his ordeal.  McCamus shows both Gennaro’s compulsion to speak and his growing awareness mixed with disgust that his friends are in such a celebratory mood that no one wants to listen.  By Act 3, Gennaro has overcome his shell-shock and McCamus lends Gennaro’s speech an air of authority and clarity that they lacked even in Act 1.

The role of Amalia is almost as complex as that of Gennaro, but Brigit Wilson is not quite as able to communicate all the levels of Amalia’s awareness of what she does.  Wilson demonstrates that Amalia’s trading on the black market has become a compulsion even in Act 1, where Amalia is ready to lie that a product is out of stock when she learns the client might have more money to pay for it later.  Wilson’s Amalia wards off Errico’s attempts to flirt in Act 1, but she could show more conflict within Amalia in Act 2 when Errico clearly wants to move on beyond flirting.  Wilson is excellent in gradually increasing the coldness with which she treat Spasiano despite his pleas for mercy, but one would like to see greater devastation on her face when Spasiano shames her with kindness at the end.

Johnathan Sousa is well cast as Amadeo.  He clearly shows the change in his character from a boisterous, carefree youth in Act 1 to a stiffer, careworn young man in Act 2.  In one of the play’s many memorable scenes Gennaro tells Brigadiere Ciappa about the disdain he holds for thieves in general, all the while knowing that Amadeo has drifted into theft himself.  Without saying a word Sousa as Amadeo grows visibly paler and more pained as he is forced to listen. 

Shruti Kothari is a lively Maria.  Through her strained speech and physical manner Kothari demonstrates how Maria longs to escape Naples just to have a chance to live without constantly being judged by her family.  By Act 2 she shows that Maria’s attempts at testing her independence against her mother’s wishes have left her chastened and fearful.

Of the huge cast of characters outside the Iovine family – 18 in all – several stand out.  Prime among these is Tom Rooney is Riccardo Spasiano.  When we first meet the character his pleading tone and inability to pay his debt to Amalia make him seem simply like one of the difficult customers any shopkeeper would have to deal with.  Yet, Rooney lends Spasiano a sincerity that underlies his pleading which only grows on us with every one of his later appearances.  Just as our view of the Iovine family without Gennaro changes from Act 1 to 2, so does our view of Spasiano.  From Act 2 onwards Rooney draws our sympathy to Spasiano and away from the coldness of Amalia.  In Act 2 Rooney’s Spasiano’s voice and gait have become weaker reflecting the character’s destitution, while his appeal to Amalia’s common humanity becomes stronger.  Rooney summons up the perfect attitude of rebuke in his great confrontation with Amalia in Act 3.

Also noteworthy is the Errico Settebellizze of Michael Blake, a smooth talker who senses that Amalia honours honesty less than Gennaro and increasingly plays upon her weakness to lead her into more doubtful money-making schemes.  His opposite is the upright and humane Brigadiere Ciappa of André Sills, who knows when Gennaro and his family are trying to hoodwink him in Act 1 but is still able to admire Gennaro for his daring.  In Act 3 the two speak like old friends and Sills brings out the compassion Ciappa feels for people who drift into crime and for their families as he warns Gennaro of what will happen if he catches Amadeo in the act.   

Through her set and her costumes, designer Julie Fox immediately conjures up the world of an impoverished wartime Naples.  Her decoration of the set for Act 2 perfectly imagines how newly rich people with little taste would redecorate the same space.  Her costumes for the whole cast illustrate how times have improved economically from Act 1 to 2, but how, even so, Amalia and Errico are set apart from the rest through their greater extravagance.

On the surface Napoli milionaria! presents a vividly realistic portrait of life in the city before and after the American occupation.  Below the surface is a complex parable about the corruption of morality during war as it affects a wide array of memorable characters.  Through the character of Gennaro, De Filippo presents the philosophical question of how people should live when the world has become devoid of meaning.  Napoli may start out as a laugh-out-loud comedy but it transforms itself into a profound meditation on humanity and on the debts that we owe each other simply to live.  Kudos to Antoni Cimolino for programming this great, wonderfully rich play and for bringing it to the stage in such a vibrant, deeply-felt production.      

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Brigit Wilson as Amalia and Tom McCamus as Gennaro; members of the company in Act 2 of Napoli Milionaria!; Tom McCamus as Gennaro; Brigit Wilson as Amalia and Tom Rooney as Spasiano. ©2018 David Hou.

For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.