Eduardo De Filippo

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Encounters with Eduardo de Filippo

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SOURCE: D'Aponte, Mimi. “Encounters with Eduardo de Filippo.” Modern Drama 16 (December 1973): 347-53.

[In the following essay, D'Aponte recounts discussions she has had with de Filippo.]

JANUARY 4, 10:00 P.M. TEATRO ELISEO, ROME

“People do become monuments.” Eduardo De Filippo is sitting alone in his dressing room, smoking. I come in without an introduction (having made my way backstage between Acts 2 and 3 of Il Monumento by looking stranded and murmuring something about an American study of Neapolitan theatre), and he immediately gets up and shakes my hand. He invites me to sit down, returns to his chair, and continues smoking. I explain my real wishes in nervous Italian (may I speak with him about his work when he returns to Naples in the spring?) and his answer is honest and to the point: “I won't remember your name. Tell my secretary you spoke with me in Rome.” I compliment him on the first two acts of his new play. De Filippo is dedicated to Il Monumento's philosophy,1 and words begin to pour out of him as he launches into a discussion of Ascanio Penna's character—his character.2 He speaks of Penna's entombment, both physically and psychologically, within his ideals. We sense someone standing at the door, and turn together to see my husband who has come to learn if I have found Eduardo. De Filippo greets him as warmly and openly as he had me, and picks up his thread of thought regarding the play. “People do become monuments because …” The stage manager knocks and calls out, “It is time, Maestro,” and the philosopher turns actor and is ready for his cue. He thanks us for coming and urges me to call him in Naples. He is off.

We have not learned why people become monuments, but we have learned something of the energy and intensity and immediacy of De Filippo. Eduardo is old if one counts by years (born May 14, 1900),3 but it is difficult to think of age in his presence. The gaunt face and body are set in motion by strong and quick movements which suggest youth. His immediate and open friendliness have escaped that aging which comes of “being someone” for too long. His passionate interest in discussing the philosophy which motivates his character reveals a mind continually searching, re-examining, building. Notions suggested by other people about Eduardo—“he is remote,” “he has become a recluse”—during my three-month stay in Italy fall by the wayside. I will see him in Naples in March. …

MARCH 16, 11:00 A.M. HOTEL ROYAL, NAPLES

Signora Quarantotto is Eduardo's secretary. She is charming, attractive, and perfectly bilingual. “Eduardo will be down in several minutes; he has been working this morning.” I begin to ask her opinion of some questions I have prepared, but almost immediately Il maestro appears and takes over. And, happily, organized questions are forgotten as his words begin to flow again.

De Filippo is a writer during the summer, an actor-director during the rest of the year. As writer he must work early in the morning; as actor and director he can function only in the late afternoon. His approach to directing calls for intense preparation (a startling contrast to the seemingly improvised results): he will rehearse his actors in a new play around a table continuously until lines are learned, then set them on stage and provide gestures and movements to fit their words. After twenty to thirty rehearsals the play will be ready for performance. In his writing, whatever preparation takes place is mental. If, as he is writing, he cannot envision the staging easily, he simply stops and ponders the problem until it has smoothed itself out. He uses no notes, and although he may have stored the conception and plot of a play in his head for ten years, he will begin to write it only when the right moment comes; that is, when he has found the right actors for his imagined characters. Two examples. He has revived his interest in a play thought out years ago. He had planned to use his sister, Titania, in the lead role, but she became ill. He is about to begin writing it now because he has finally found the right actress for this part. And he wants to write another play about love again because he has found the right actors for the lovers' parts.

His approach as actor? He mentions working out a characterization before a mirror. He refers to his essay written for Actors on Acting “at Toby Cole's repeated request,”4 in which he states that an actor's art evolves continually, and that the real study of that art begins upon contact with an audience.5 He speaks of knowing one's character so thoroughly that this knowledge may often be reflected in ways unknown to the actor himself. And he remembers that when asked by a young actor many years ago how he developed his characterizations, he had to answer that he did not know.

He does know, however, and most clearly, how his actors are trained (perhaps “planted” might be a better word). After a new member of his company has been selected, De Filippo as maestro demands three things: time, then patience, then impatience. The new actor is hired for a period of either two or three years. During the first year or so, he is instructed to observe—“nothing else!” He is paid to watch his would-be colleagues perform their craft. When, despite his desire to succeed, the actor is ready to quit out of sheer boredom, he is then given a part—a small part. For now, says Eduardo, he has learned as much as possible from observation. And now it is Eduardo's turn to offer time, patience and impatience.

“The theatre is made up of great actors and good actors, of big actors and small actors. All are necessary to the health of the theatre.” These remarks are made with direct reference to an actor in the company whose work Eduardo thinks is going well; he is satisfied with the progress shown. And even as he speaks of giving the actor time to develop and of having patience in discovering the scope of his individual art, I am aware of listening to the voice of a rigorous taskmaster—one whose actors must strive mightily to please, perhaps as much for the sake of his satisfaction as for the aske of their own survival.

We speak of philosophical matters. Eduardo has an intense interest in the multiplicity of things which happen simultaneously. We are speaking happily away about theatre, and at the same time all sorts of terrible things are taking place. The juxtaposition of simultaneous events is one of life's most poignant ironies, Eduardo feels, and a favorite in the dramatic worlds of his creation. In the two De Filippo plays performed at the San Ferdinando theatre in Naples this year, for example, such juxtaposition creates the central conflicts.6 I ask Eduardo whether he thinks the force of human good greater than that of human evil. I expect a negative answer based upon my understanding of that comic pessimism which pervades his writing and often causes a seemingly pure comedy to twist tragically with shocking abruptness. But such an answer is not forthcoming. “There is a balance between the good and bad in man. We never know whether human action has worked out to help the good or the bad. What is evil can have good effects.” And Eduardo goes on to defend, with marvelous intimacy, the actions of Geronta Sebezio—as if that character were among his dearest friends. Geronta Sebezio is the central figure in Il Contratto7 who, after having been established as a comic, quasi-divine hero, is discovered to have been manipulating in the most fraudulent manner the poor and ignorant peasantry.

We return to a more conventional subject—what is happening in contemporary European and American theatre. Eduardo states that, while he approves of experimentation, he does not believe in instant theatre, nor does he believe in coercing audience participation. He believes in the seeming improvisation of gifted and disciplined actors, rather than the improvisation of non-actors. He accepts as theatre new forms of presentation which evolve, but does not think that presentations which change radically from one performance to another can be called theatre. Audience participation comes of wooing, of ensnaring with laughter perhaps—but not of forcing or demanding. “In my theatre, the audience is not in the theatre, but where the play takes place. When the play is over, the audience should wake up in the theatre, as if it has been asleep, dreaming.” As for the development of his own theatre: “It grew because it was left alone. Nobody disturbed it for thirty years. (‘Oh, it's dialect theatre—it will pass.’) And so, with time and the opportunity to grow naturally, a theatre developed. You can't learn to act in a year, or build a theatre in a year.”

Throughout this conversation I am continually struck by the independence of this seventy-one year old man. He does not go out of his way to be diplomatic (must we not all espouse the doings of the theatre of the moment for fear of being outdated ourselves?), nor is he particularly gentle (“I would kill my mother in order to get something done on stage in the way I think it must be done!”). He is forthright and intense and very much his own man. Eduardo is that rarity in the world today—a free artist in the theatre. As an actor he need submit only to his author self. He is free—because of his genius perhaps, because he has achieved worldly success, or because he has cultivated a lifetime habit of going his own way.

APRIL 5, 6:00 P.M. TEATRO SAN FERDINANDO, NAPLES

Neapolitan traffic on Mondays is unbelievably ghastly, and we arrive at the theatre in a foul humour—late for a rehearsal I had asked a month ago to see. Act 2 of Napoli Milionaria has just begun: a single brush-up rehearsal before the revival, which has been playing in Rome, opens in Naples for a two-month run. Eduardo is simply putting the pieces back just so—to where they were before the troupe left Naples, or to where they were in 1945 perhaps?

Eduardo, three giggly female fans of a young actor and ourselves are the only occupants in the darkened theatre. My husband is having a difficult time controlling his laughter, and, while cursing him inwardly for understanding all the dialect jokes, I am delighted that the dialogue is so quickly alleviating his driver's headache. The laughs are flowing steadily when suddenly Eduardo stops everything. A chair has been moved to the wrong position. The second interruption occurs after another twenty lines or so—this time over the unnecessary addition of the monosyllable “eh” following the line Sono zitella? (“Am I a virgin?” by a female character whose husband departed for the battlefront immediately following their wedding night spent in a crowded air raid shelter.) Another, longer “ehhhhh!” brings about the next correction: its pitch must rise as its volume becomes crescendo. All the actors laugh as Eduardo demonstrates, and my husband laughs as the actress gets it right this time. The would-be lover of the central female character is criticized for seeming antipatico when he suggests casually that perhaps her soldier husband is already dead—the line must be read with concern. The central character is reminded that she has substituted tornati for arrivati. Eduardo is not directing from a script.

Eduardo's transition from director to actor is so deceptively simple that it is all but unrecognizable. At the beginning of Act 3 he walks casually up the stairs which separate stage from house, as he has done several times during Act 2, and proceeds to speak softly. I suddenly realize that he is neither demonstrating nor explaining. He is speaking for himself—in this instance Gennaro Jovine, soldier-come-home and father of a dangerously ill little girl. De Filippo is so polished; his acting is as polished as his directing, or is it the other way around? The word which comes to mind is showman: Eduardo is an impeccable showman.

What remains to be spoken of regarding this look into Eduardo's rehearsal life is that exhausted subject in American theatre, the director-actor relationship. As with so many overly discussed American relationships what is needed, perhaps, is a bit of Italian despotism. Eduardo appears, so Signora Quarantotto tells me, half an hour early at each and every rehearsal. Can minutiae of this sort explain the reverence with which these actors absorb their master's every word? Italian good manners perhaps. (But whenever did so many Italians listen so attentively to one of their number?) Is it crass to mention that Eduardo pays everyone's salary and possesses the ultimate power of hiring and firing? Or is it perhaps that, for these actors, as for most, the embodiment of discipline and devotion and success is hard to come by—and Eduardo represents these qualities to his company. Then there is the way in which Eduardo expresses himself as critic: the actor's smallest action and least sound are worth his highest attention and a trip up onto the stage. Traditional directing perhaps? Or simply good directing? There is not a moment wasted. It is a serious business and very hard work, this creation of laughs.

MAY 21, 11:00 P.M. S. AGNELLO, SORRENTO

A chronological reading of De Filippo's plays reveals the initial predominance of dialect writing and its gradual abandonment in favor of formal Italian after the Second World War. I mentioned to Eduardo during our meeting in March that, in this respect, his plays had become increasingly easy for me to read. I wondered in what way this linguistic transformation might correspond to a recent statement of his: “The effort of my life has been to release the dialect theatre, bringing it toward a national theatre.”8 Eduardo's answer was to refer me immediately to a newspaper article he had written in 1938.9 This rebuts the well-known critic, Gherardo Gherardi, who had accused him of helping the Italian theatre to remain a backward and nomadic organization, when he might better have been aiding and abetting its growth and development. The reply which De Filippo offered the readers of Il Giornale d'Italia is inspiring, and doubly so when read thirty-three years later with the results of that inspiration at hand. The dialect actors of Italy are good Italians, asserts De Filippo, and they do not resign themselves to remaining enclosed in regional circles. The methods of dialect companies might well be recommended to all aspiring Italian actors, for these demand discipline and sacrifice and love of the art of theatre. And Eduardo offers Gherardi advice if he is truly interested in the future of Italian theatre: (1) constitute small, but excellent companies; (2) give the actors the security of from three to five years' work so that they may study and work together in tranquillity of spirit; (3) give them strong direction; (4) give the company a free choice of repertory—and look forward to a healthy national theatre! Eduardo has been acting since 1910 and writing plays since 1920 (nearly fifty of these have been produced). It is extravagant, but satisfying nonetheless, to suggest that at the time of writing there is no Neapolitan who is not proud of his fellow, Eduardo De Filippo, and no theatre-conscious Italian who does not claim Eduardo's work as part of his own national theatre.

Perhaps a key to Eduardo's genius is his time sense: in comic dialogue, in comedy-tragedy reversal, in those carefully choreographed, seemingly improvised stage movements which are the trademark (or should one say birthright?) of his actors, in that slow nutritive process of directing and teaching and liberating actors so that their individual techniques become strong, in his staging of the lives of strong acting companies. Eduardo the tightly-coiled philosopher of theatre aesthetics, Eduardo the patiently demanding director, Eduardo the most outwardly relaxed of actors. The when of the theatre is Eduardo's secret, and there are few who understand it as well as he.

Eduardo owns an island—Ischa (not Ischia!), which is directly off the coast of Nerano, and indirectly off that of Positano. He goes there—in summertime only—to take up his morning writer's existence. The parish priest of Positano, Father Raffaele Talamo, tells the story of the young Positanese boy whom Eduardo chose to appear in a television drama of his some years ago. This handsome giovanotto is not an actor today, but a naval officer (for his mother was put down by the other mammas in town for having exhibited excessive pride in the TV performances of her man-child). Perhaps many will heave a sigh of relief to learn that this young man has escaped the grip of the theatre (with money in the bank from the television series), but I would disagree. For the boy at ten, like Eduardo when he was ten, was learning to act under Eduardo's tutelage in that timeless way which produces true actors. The plentiful years of learning without rush—the apprenticeship. An unpopular concept today, for now it is instant theatre, commercial splash, do-it-yourself. But if we are to speak of the theatre of Eduardo De Filippo, then we must speak of a more complete time sense.10

Notes

  1. Il Monumento, Torino, 1970. The play proposes De Filippo's social theory once again: the underdog is “the good guy.” This “good guy” is not perfect, but he at least retains his humanity—as men in positions of authority do not. De Filippo's concept of humanity might be illustrated by paraphrasing a sentence from his preface to the play: the belief in love—love between man and woman, man and children, man and country.

  2. The play permits Eduardo to function easily both as director and, philosophically speaking, as central character. Its action develops from what Penna thinks now and did long ago, and from what he, therefore, does not do now. His non-doing causes the other characters to do everything around him, thereby permitting the actor of Penna to function as director of those other characters' actions. Penna's/Eduardo's primary function in the play is to listen; his secondary function is to die.

  3. He has written himself a part in Il Monumento in which his wife demands that he dye his hair—hair which is put on nightly.

  4. Eduardo does not believe that the writing of acting theories helps to create better theatre; the end result is usually argument and misinterpretation.

  5. Eduardo De Filippo, “The Intimacy of Character and Actor,” trans. by Vivian Leone, Actors on Acting, ed. by Helen Krish Chinoy and Toby Cole, New York, 1970, pp. 470-72.

  6. In Il Monumento, Ascanio Penna lives underground, withdrawn from the world above him, which cast away twenty years ago the ideals to which he still clings so tenaciously. In Napoli Milionaria (Torino, 1945), Gennaro Jovine fights a war while his wife becomes rich on the blackmarket and his son becomes a car thief. And when he begins to speak compulsively of war's sufferings on his return, his family and friends refuse to listen and proceed to celebrate—something he is no longer capable of doing.

  7. Besides Il Contratto (Torina, 1967), the following plays contain the comic-tragic twist mentioned above. In Natale in Casa Cupiello (Torino, 1931), the family looks on as Luca dies blessing his daughter and her lover, whom he takes to be his son-in-law—who is also observing the scene! In La Parte di Amleto (Torino, 1940), an old actor is cruelly tricked into believing that he will play Hamlet for the tardy leading man. In Le Voci di Dentro (Torino, 1948), Zio Nicola, the hilarious figure who addresses remarks to the rest of mankind exclusively through the medium of firecrackers, is found dead in his self-devised aerial shelter. In Il Cilindro (Torino, 1965), the central characters seem to have happily escaped their problems only to find that one of them has learned too much of the selfishness of the other three to continue with their family life. Except for the most recent Il Contratto and Il Monumento, all of Eduardo's works may be found in Cantata dei Giorni Pari (5th rev. ed.), and Cantata dei Giorni Dispari (7th rev. ed.) (Torino: Einaudi, 1966).

  8. See Chinoy and Cole, Actors on Acting, pp. 470-72. This statement, translated above from Eduardo's original Italian manuscript, seems to have been deleted from the current edition.

  9. Eduardo De Filippo, “Edùardo De Filippo difende il suo teatro,” Il Giornale d'Italia, Roma: 15 dic. 1938.

  10. Throughout this article, quotations have been translated by the author.

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