Is Naples’ favourite theatrical son Eduardo de Filippo gaining in popularity in Britain at last? If so, why? Perhaps the increasingly numerous squeezed middle now finds more to identify with in de Filippo’s inhabitants of the penniless Spanish Quarter, or at least we take solace in posing as similarly impoverished. Amid the crisis of capitalism, we can also use these characters to ennoble ourselves, rationalising that we may be whores and crooks but we have our own values of honour and respectability.
    
In this case, the honour is that of the eponymous 45-year-old former prostitute Filumena, who after 27 years of concubinage to Domenico has just faked a terminal illness in order to secure his hand in marriage. The play begins shortly after her miraculous recovery, in a scene of sparky unrepentance in which she sees off Domenico’s current bit of skirt, her own nurse (!), and candidly informs him that in younger life she bore three sons, now all grown up, and she has wangled the marriage solely with a view to legitimising them. When Domenico is on the verge of having the marriage annulled, Filumena plays her trump: one of the young men is his offspring, but she will never tell him which one.
    
Samantha Spiro is one of a handful of actors – Janie Dee and Bertie Carvel are others – who seem to take a visible, even palpable delight in acting. I do not mean that they are bravura or seem to wear the role like a coat instead of inhabiting it; rather, it energises them to the core. Spiro’s Filumena may look drawn and haggard, but she crackles with an electricity not yet wired into Domenico’s villa itself. Director Michael Attenborough has Clive Wood’s Domenico establish the strain of Neapolitan machismo from the very start, as he bursts on to the stage literally beating himself up for having been fooled. The diverse trio of sons – an honest plumber, a diffident writer and a lecherous tailor – include Luke Norris, whose first play as an author Goodbye To All That has just finished its run at the Royal Court. Attenborough could, however, inject more pace at several points, which might counteract the feeling that the third act’s stratagems suddenly and inexplicably dissipate into a sentimental ending.

Written for the Financial Times.