Arts
Environmental patriarchs
Ted Whitehead
The Sunset Touch (Bristol Old Vic Theatre Royal) Filumena (Lyric) The title of Johnathan Raban's first stage play, 'The Sunset Touch,' is taken from 'Bishop Blougram's. Apology' in which Browning reflects on the Grand Perhaps of religion. Given as hero a cleric named Alec Hope, I expected a polite inquiry into the question whether there might be transcendent life in the old church yet. But Raban's interest is clearly more in the sunset than in the touch, and Hope is revealed as just a stock conservative curate who has retreated from the contemporary world of fly-overs and tower blocks and tranquilisers and multi-racial communities to the haven of The Times crossword (though he thinks that even that's going down the nick). Enter a young whizz-kid encyclopaedia salesman who charms Hope with his word-power and also seduces his gawky young bluestocking of a daughter. The encyclopaedia is one of those designed to give you 'Wittgenstein in ten minutes' and struck me as a suitable target for Raban, who is one of the contributors to the recently published Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, a compilation of all those words you need nowadays to keep in with the in-crowd. But having set up a situation in which bright new semiology dazzles tired old theology, Raban then throws it away by revealing that the salesman is actually a mental case. I know that the Church may be gullible and some of the sharpest intellects may have a screw loose, but this is a bit too easy; on the basis of Raban's prolific cultural commentaries elsewhere, I had hoped for a more complex treatment of the perils of pop intellectualism.
But as if in flight from his own facility, he falls headlong into another trap: the belief that monosyllables are more 'real' than polysyllables. He brings on the salesman's suffering proletarian wife, whose constant effing and blinding is supposed to illustrate the unreality of all the others. The context makes it difficult for the talented Sheila Ballantine to do much with this part, as she has to swear like a trooper in a suspiciously posh accent. David Buck as the salesman has his manic moments in the first act but disintegrates with the character, while Angus Mackay is too much of a caricature as the fuddy-duddy cleric. But Marty Cruikshank is very funny as the earnest Young Liberal daughter, played in Joyce Grenfell style, and very glamorous when love has worked its metamorphosis. John Elvery's startling design gives us not only the lounge but the church tower above it and the tower blocks beyond — the whole environment of the play, in fact. The director was Eric Thompson.
Eduardo de Filippo, the author of Filumena at the Lyric, has written over fifty plays and doesn't it show. He has an unerring instinct for melodramatic effect and tawdry emotion. I sat wriggling with embarrassment through most of this play, which begins with artificial dramatics and ends in a riot of false feeling. It might just work if played — very heavily — as a period melodrama, but astonishingly the director, Franco Zeffirelli, presents it as if it were a masterpiece of ironic realism. The danger signs are there right at the start, when Jean Plowright is enduring a tirade from Colin Blakely — and she stands for about two minutes with her back to us before suddenly swinging round to treat us to a full facial. And so it goes on, self-conscious acting conspiring with contrived writing.
But, for those who like this sort of thing, and obviously there are some, perhaps I should take refuge in a summary of the plot. Filumena is an ex-prostitute who has lived for twenty-five years with Domenico as his mistress; on learning that he has fallen in love with the latest of his many other mistresses, she pretends that she is dying and persuades him to marry her as a deathbed gesture. We first meet them at this point, as Filumena celebrates her triumph and screams her hatred of his 'twentytwo-year-old cow', who is never going to darken what are now her doors again. She advises the young woman: 'Find somewhere else to bounce your tits and waggle your arse.' Domenico discovers that such a marriage is not valid under Italian law, and tells Filumena to get out. Now she reveals why she wanted to marry him: to acquire his name and to legitimise three children she had had when working in the brothel all those years ago. The other girls, she says, took abortion for granted, but, would rather have died myself than take the lives of three unborn children.' Under pressure, she had sought the advice of the Madonna of the Roses and while kneeling at the shrine heard a voice say: 'A child is a child.' And three are three, and she had brought them up secretly with Domenico's money. Even this pious tale doesn't affect the old rake, so she plays her trump card by telling him that one of the three — all sons — is his. That almost does it — what proud Italian male can resist a son, even if he is twentyfive and any one of three men? He interrogates the three, comparing their relative satyriasis and musicality to identify his heir, but fails. All three simultaneously call him 'Father' and that does the trick. He marries Filumena and she tells him that she has loved him all along and he tells her that he etc. The maid lights sixty candles at the shrine of the Madonna of the Roses, who subsequently appears in the living room — well, the maid suddenly gasps and kneels down and looks up in the air with the expression of one who has seen a UFO.
All this is padded out with little incidents, like the maid recounting an unbearably boring life story; and one son chatting up a servant girl with the line, 'You shouldn't be scrubbing floors with a face like yours,' to which she replies, 'I don't —I use a scrubbing brush.' I dreaded the moment when Filumena would tell us the one about how poverty drove her into the brothel, but the author is merciless. It never seems to cross his mind that there might be a connection between the institution of marriage and the institution of the brothel, or between the system of inheritance and the 'accident' of poverty. Admittedly this is an Italian play written in 1946, but then Pirandello had written his last play in 1937. Filumena is a moral tale of how a whore becomes a matriarch, and a bad patriarch becomes a good patriarch. No wonder you don't find any feminists more militant than the Italians.
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