Filumena

Synopsis

After 25 years Filumena is to be thrown over for a younger woman. She pretends to be dying, inveigling Domenico into a 'deathbed' marriage. When he proves the marriage null and void she informs him she has three grown sons - one of them his. After trying in vain to discover his son's identity he marries her. Filumena keeps the secret but will it all end in happiness.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 23 March 2012

In a programme note, director Michael Attenborough marvels at the fact that you can buy fridge magnets of Eduardo De Filippo in the airport at Naples: why none of Harold Pinter at Heathrow?

The answer is that De Filippo was a genuinely popular dramatist who wrote easily out of his own culture, while Pinter was a poet for the elite, distilling his own culture for a new one. And it’s that warm-hearted, natural Neapolitan flavour to De Filippo’s old-fashioned comedies that is so difficult to recreate in chilly north London.

The case for Filumena Marturano, the former prostitute who has tricked a wealthy businessman, Domenico Sopriano, into marrying her after sharing his life, or some of it, for a quarter of a century, was most persuasively made by Franco Zeffirelli and Joan Plowright.

Attenborough’s revival starring Samantha Spiro is jolly good, but it’s curiously inauthentic, too, and a bit too demure, despite the tangle o...

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Latest User Review

David Baxter - 3 May 2012:

Robert Jones' set design for Filumena is a beautiful Neapolitan courtyard but it is the only thing remotely Italian about this production. The premise of the former prostitute feigning near-death to persuade her lover to marry her is initially very funny and the attempt to introduce her three sons into the household should be funnier, but it all flounders on a complete lack of Mediterranean passion. Samantha Spiro has been much praised elsewhere but her Filumena reminded me of a Jewish Felicity Kendall and I had to look at the programme to check that Geoffrey Freshwater had not been replaced by Kenneth Cranham as a highly cliched old retainer. Filumena offers a couple of hours of cosy amusement but we have come to expect more than that from the Almeida....

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