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 | Saturday Sunday Monday Little Theatre Thu 11 August, Season closed Mamma mia! Something must have been lost in the translation - five minutes with this family would have been enough, let alone three hours. Playwright Eduardo de Filippo was a giant of Italian stage and film with major play writing, screen writing, acting and directing credits. Born in 1900 and in front of the footlights by the age of five, he lived a remarkable life in show business as a playwright, screenwriter, director and actor until his death in 1984. Best known for scripts in his native Neapolitan, 'Sabato, Domenica e Luneda,' written in 1959, invites us into the Campanian home of a squabbly family that groans with familiarity to anyone a bit uncomfortable with the Sunday lunch for seventeen at the parents'. Director Geoff Crowhurst let his undisciplined cast run amuck with the script and there wasn't much let-up from the shouting and pained expressions. Caught in the characters' excitement, the actors frequently murdered their accents and became unintelligible. Each had their own version of Australio-Italian and I wondered how necessary accents were: you don't see 'Hedda Gabler' done with Norwegian accents. The production failed to dish out bluster and poignancy, and love and loathing, as real as the pasta on your plate. Eugene Suleau scowled through much muddled speech as the patriarch-in-waiting, Peppino. Anna Linarello as his wife and cook, Rosa, misused her skill and energy in playing a role that should have come to her more naturally. On the other side of the ledger, John Edge did his best as the head of the family, but it was Simon Davey who was the most relaxed with Neapolitan family life of 1959, even as he espoused archaic macho nonsense that we can only hope is dead and buried even in Italy. I'm sure the movie - where Italian actors play people more or less like themselves and the intonation and character detail is enhanced by the language while the subtitles keep you apprised - is more successful. As director Geoff Crowhurst says in the program notes, the dynamism, passion and energy of Neapolitan culture were diluted in translation. Crowhurst did a great job directing traffic around the dining table, but the cars still got stuck in a jam.  | |
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