Eduardo De Filippo by Mario B. Mignone (review)

Book Reviews 139 MARlO B. MIGNONE. Eduardo De Filippo. Boston: Twayne Publishers 1984· Pp. 197. $18.95. The recent death of Eduardo De Filippo has deprived us of an extraordinary man of theater. He had participated in the life of theater as an actor, director, playwright, impresario, educator. In a long and fruitful career De Filippo wrote some forty-five plays, all of them performed by his own theater company, which he founded in 1945. Especially popular as an acror-playwright, De Filippo has often been linked to Moliere as a versatile comic genius. His works, offspring of the Neapolitan tradition of popular theater and, in particular. of the commedia dell 'arte, have been compared to the plays of Synge and O'Casey in their skillful use of local color and dialect. Drawing on extensive inteIViews with the playwright and attentively investigating his life and the iler of his dramatic art, Mario B. Mignone offers us the fIrst in-depth evaluation in English of the acclaimed artist. Mignone sets out to show how De Filippo found genuine inspiration in the reality of Naples, a paradoxical city in which the people are rich and poor; where they can, at the same lime, laugh and cry, love and hate, be religious and superstitious, ruthless and life loving. He rightly stresses that "De Filippo's attention is focused above all on the masses and lower middle class of Naples, on that part of the population for whom the tests of life are harder but not necessarily more tragic than those 'better off,' because they have an innate flair for life" (p. 21 ). Indeed, because the playwright could capture in their fullness these paradoxical aspects ofNaples, De Filippo achieved a high degree ofdrama and theatricality even in dealing with seemingly cerebral themes. For example, "the philosophy of the absurd, very evident in his plays, is not so much the subject matter of his characters' discussion as the Neapolitan way of life" (p. 23). Even the early plays of Dc Filippo, published under the title Cantata dei giomi pari, present a rich stylistic variety which avails itself of satire, irony, the grotesque, the comical, the humoristic, farce, caricature, sarcasm and buffoonery. These plays show the wretched reality of Naples during the Fascist period, and already reveal the characteristic critical attitude of the author, full of pathos. From these works was born the first defilippian character, Sik-Sik, who, even though possessing the traits of famous masks of the commedia dell 'arte, is actually a sad image of twentieth-century man who lives in solitude at the edges of life. Many defilippian characters are so immersed in their feelings and ideals that they do not succeed in seeing clearly their surrounding reality. For example, the protagonist of Chi e cchiu' felice 'e me!, in order to protect his ideal of happiness, is not at all upset by his wife's infidelity. The protagonists of these plays rarely succeed in realizing their desires; they are tragicomic, antiheroic figures who are approaching insanity as a result of the disintegration of their personalities. In Non ti pago. L'abito IlUOYO and various other works, the Neapolitan world assumes a pirandellian perspective. At the end of World War II, De Filippo's theater reflected neorealist tendencies. Indeed, De Filippo had already touched on the themes and ways ofneorealism in some of his early plays; now, the War having given him a more universal sense of history, he could write some of his best works in this style. Above all, he became preoccupied with Book Reviews the problems left by the War, with man's new hopes, with social changes. Mignone illustrates this special moment of defilippian art by carefully examining Napoli milionaria! and Filumena Marturano, especially the figure of Filumena. She is a character ofenonnous complexity, capable ofsimultaneously carrying on a fight against the prejudices of society, asserting her maternal rights and her most intimate feelings, inspiring in Domenico paternal feelings even for her sons born from her other relationships, and attaining her dream of having a family. The defilippian plays of the fifties, displaying pessimism and dealing with the theme ofthe relationship between reality and illusion, hide a philosophic...