Eduardo De Filippo left us extensive correspondence and a large archive: a fortune for scholars, biographers but also for simple enthusiasts who can draw on books and even recent studies on one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century. Forget the anecdotal, the perfidious and gruff Eduardo, the quarrels with Peppino: messy stuff that does not put and does not leverage, if not lowered into a wider context, that of the artistic production of a man who has begun to tread scenes very young, table-table, nail-nail.
Among the most significant correspondence is the correspondence with his sister Titina. A very sensitive, acute woman, a wonderful interpreter and never too celebrated protagonist of the Italian theater, Titina De Filippo, speaking of the Role – the capital letter is not accidental – that Eduardo conceived for her, that of Filumena Marturano, wrote to his brother:
“When you stay close to an actor of your strength for twenty years, the least you can do is learn to imitate him. It’s like opening a bag of gold glitter: however much you can do, a little bit remains stuck to your fingers… ».
Titina thus saw not her brother but the director of the company, the actor, the author of farces, comedies, tragedies, tragicomedies. A character so powerful that he was able not only to enlighten others on stage but to leave them something unique and unrepeatable forever.
And how many artists have benefited from this glitter? Many, many: imagine the third act of “Christmas at the Cupiello house” in 1977 and the many faces that play the neighbors of Don Luca by now dying. These are faces that we have seen for years on stages and on TV. That way of being an actor (“a life of sacrifice and frost”) has been a point of reference for many actors.
We come to the present day. The “Christmas in the Cupiello house” by Edoardo De Angelis with Sergio Castellitto and Marina Confalone enjoys an absolute advantage: in a dose horribilis like this, every novelty seems like a marvel dropped from heaven.
It is December 22, 2020, Naples has had a sunny day that does not make it seem like Christmas is three days away. Despite this, those who dare to go out on the street feel almost like a criminal: we wear masks (and they are not Pirandellian-Edwardian ones, they are masks obviously, those from the hospital) we escape an invisible virus that really makes us the protagonists of an Eduardo-like tragicomedy. Who knows what the master of the “coffee ban” of these days would have thought.
Edoardo De Angelis was born in 1978, is in his forties and has had “chesta ciorta “, to put it to Concetta: he directed a television transposition of the most famous Edwardian opera for the Italian radio and television for forty-three years from the last, that unforgettable 1977. He did it with an important budget provided by the generous mother Rai, with a license to dare (widely used, not always right the choices) by expanding and modifying the text, enriching it with music and with external environments, bringing the story to the 1950s, imagining a photography and costumes that are very reminiscent of a recent and successful product: the Genial Friend.
Eduardo De Filippo is gone, Luca is no longer there, who left this world too soon. In fact, it would have been up to him to bring this text back to TV but life goes like this and from Eduardo’s comedies we also learn this.
On TV, therefore, we see Sergio Castellitto who, not wanting to imitate and not being able to revolutionize, created his Luca, as was right. There is Marina Confalone, called as a cornerstone to guarantee the authenticity of this production which is not a ‘revival’ of the past.
Stop it? No. It is missing the farsesc toneor, on the line between drama and comedy, between fact and paradox typical of Edwardian poetics. Castellitto is constantly infuriated, he is not the enchanted Lucariello, he looks more like Ferdinando Quagliuolo than “I don’t pay you!”. Where is all the Neapolitan nuance, what makes Luca Cupiello a bearable man despite his total detachment from reality? In short, those who have already seen Eduardo find it hard to watch this television transposition. It would be necessary to understand among the youngest, or among those who do not know the work of the Neapolitan playwright at all, how it was taken.
So Eduardo did not come back to us tonight. He did not let the magic purple fall on the public: maybe that’s right, maybe it’s necessary. Don’t worry: he is there, exactly where we want and where we left him. He lives in the ‘low’ culture which is that of the simple joke about the nativity scene or in the high one that articulates his thoughts on the crisis of the family, on the relationship with power and justice, on modern neuroses, on Naples the “Millionaire” who is waiting to to pass the night (and since when and for how many times have we repeated this phrase?).
Eduardo the playwright, the actor with a once bewitching tone, once hieratic, the comedian, the humorist, the poet, the writer, the professor, the senator.
We leave what is right to Edoardo De Angelis and his leading actors together with Pina Greco, Adriano Pantaleo, Tony Laudadio, Antonio Milo: they worked in a difficult year, they brought back the best known “Christmas” of Italian theater on TV to end of a terrible period. It is a historical fact and will probably also be rewarded by the television audience.
And tonight, actresses, actors and director, opening their hand, at least they, will find on the palm a little of that purple gold told by Titina. Because, as Eduardo replied to his sister: “Each of us has his own… each of us has the gold dust of Art on his fingers“. Let us hope that it will help with the subsequent tests.
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