…or read the books?
Just back from the second of the two, two act plays of My Brilliant Friend at the National - the two play adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s four hugely successful ‘Neapolitan Novels’, each act dramatizing one book.
The novels, telling of the developing relationship between two, initially young pre-adolescent, girls through to adulthood and beyond stars Niamh Cusack and Catherine McCormack – both wholly believable at their various ages in each book/ act, and reprising their roles in its first production at The Rose Theatre, Kingston.
These books immerse their readers in the claustrophobic atmosphere of crime laden Neapolitan slums as they emerge from WWII and the fascist oppression of the times into the post war period, where crime families, poverty and politics still dominate, but where some elements of freedom, especially for women, are just emerging.
The problem with this production is that the vast (and mainly empty, this is very minimalist) acres of the Olivier, with a stark stage setting of wheeled open staircases to replicate crowded slum tenement blocks are anything but atmospheric or immersive.
The plot becomes episodic and however well-acted, and staged (and this is well acted and staged, and indeed choreographed), there is no sense of place, particularly not of Neapolitan slums. Stringing a washing line with a couple of blankets (for a couple of minutes) does not Naples make.
A group of characters all born and brought up in the same tiny neighbourhood have the accents their actors were born with, so Niamh is proudly Irish in a sea of Brits (Scouse, Geordie, a Welsh woman…) .
One actor, starting as a child at school, has grey hair and a monk’s tonsure – couldn’t the National have sprung a syrup, at least for when he’s playing a 10 year old?
The very stylised play has no consistency when portraying children (adults dressed as adults, adults wearing short trousers, puppets…) The effect is to distance the audience from the protagonists, we do not share their lives, but observe them.
As we are distanced, so we cannot have sympathy, or even empathy; precisely, I believe, the opposite effect from the source novels.
Reading them is to live in Naples (and occasionally Florence); watching this is to be sitting in the Olivier auditorium.
Considering this as a four act play over two sessions, Act 2 is more engaging than Act 1. Act 3 (the play 2 opening) is at least coherent, if slightly obvious and Act 4 is incident packed when the incidents seem unrelated and at times irrelevant.
In the end, the plays are, at best, about a relationship now without location context (not true of the novels) and not an entirely convincing one. To those who know and love the books, it’s like watching a staging of the Wiki synopsis, without the engagement of the novels. To those who haven’t read the books, this Wiki synopsis doesn’t make a great deal of sense.