A pot of tomato sauce left unattended on the stove can only hold itself together for so long. So it is with the Priore family at the centre of Eduardo De Filippo’s Saturday, Sunday, Monday. They bottle things up, turning every disappointment into a cordial grudge until resentment bubbles over in melodramatic eruptions.
Fittingly, Vesuvius looms beyond the broad windows of the Priore family home at Stratford’s Avon Theatre, framed by rows of buildings receding in Renaissance perspective. The culinary metaphor, meanwhile, comes ready-made. Before Antoni Cimolino’s production begins, sauce is already bubbling on the stove of Douglas Paraschuk’s spacious kitchen set, waiting for Donna Rosa (Rose Napoli) to lower the meat into the ragù.
It is Naples, 1959, and family serenity is in shorter supply. At the heart of De Filippo’s three-act comedy is Peppino Priore (Graham Abbey), a husband consumed by the belief that his wife, Donna Rosa, is having an affair with their neighbour Luigi Iannello (Gordon S. Miller). Appropriately enough, Abbey plays Peppino’s jealousy like a pressure cooker: his hands twitch and clench, while booming declarations taper into a thin, puffed-up falsetto of suppressed rage.
But Saturday, Sunday, Monday is more than a bourgeois comedy about a suspicious husband. De Filippo’s household is an ecosystem of competing figures bound by a hunger for recognition. Peppino and Rosa each feel taken for granted by the other; their son Rocco (Emilio Vieira) wants his father’s approval; the retired hatmaker Grandpa Antonio (Rod Beattie) clings to his patriarchal authority; uncle Raffaele (Geraint Wyn Davies) craves an audience for his amateur theatrics. Across an ensemble of 17, from extended family to neighbours and friends, almost everyone is dissatisfied and waiting for someone else to notice.
Only once across the three-hour production do those competing demands briefly fall silent. Midway through the second act, after a near-constant churn of sardonic exchanges and bodies in motion, the Priore clan sits down to Sunday lunch, dressed in Francesca Callow’s sumptuous Sunday best. A mandolin plays softly, Michael Walton’s lighting closes in around the table, and, for a few seconds, the stage melts into an Italian family portrait: dishes pass hand to hand, everyone apparently content.
Cimolino stretches the moment into soul-stirring enchantment. There is something of the communal dinner in Federico Fellini’s Roma (1972) in the scene’s conviviality — a tableau suspended between affection and nostalgia. But harmony doesn’t last. Soon, another micro-crisis breaks the spell: Nonno refuses to eat until Rocco, his favourite grandchild, arrives.
De Filippo punctuates this candid portrait of family dynamics with a succession of scenate napoletane — public spectacles born of the smallest grievances. Yet however theatrical these characters become, the play never tips into farce. Cimolino deftly walks the line between being melodramatic and playing melodrama, grounding this bustling microcosm in sharp stage business — most memorably, a running gag in which Grandpa Antonio irons hats until he deforms them.
Napoli’s volcanic Donna Rosa is the clearest example of that balancing act. Brassy and perpetually eyebrow-cocked, she rules the household with the bossy tenderness of someone forever fed up with her family and forever looking after her children — Rocco, Giulianella (Katarina Fiallos), and Roberto (Jakob Ehman). Her shouting points to the play’s central concern: the fallibility of communication. Everyone vents in bursts, yet rarely swallows their pride to speak openly about their hurts and apprehensions.
Translating a play so rooted in place and social rhythm is no easy task, but Cimolino and co-adapter Donato Santeramo do an impressive job of preserving its Italian flavour without turning it into a parade of clichés. The actors speak in North American accents, yet De Filippo’s world survives in the syntax and sardonic cadences, punctuated by spurts of Signora, Madonna, and buon appetito. That evocation of a distant, perhaps vanished social world lends a nostalgic undertone to what is also a farewell. Saturday, Sunday, Monday is Cimolino’s final show as Stratford’s artistic director, closing his 39-season relationship with the Festival with the playwright of his 1997 solo directing debut.
But for me, as an Italian immigrant, the production is a kind of homecoming. There is pride in seeing De Filippo command a stage of this stature beyond Italy. In the bluntness of the lines, I could hear the rhythms of my own humour: sharp timing, poor diplomacy. Most of all, the play brought me back to Southern Italy, where my mother used to tell me, “When rage gets the better of you, count to ten and only then speak.” Wise advice, perhaps. In practice, counting merely gave me time to inhale more deeply, so the resulting scream could be louder. Perhaps Giulianella has it right. Perhaps it’s better to “say things as soon as they happen.”
Saturday, Sunday, Monday runs at Stratford’s Avon Theatre until October 24. More information is available here.
Intermission reviews are independent and unrelated to Intermission’s partnered content. Learn more about Intermission’s partnership model here.
WRITTEN BY
Alessandro Stracuzzi
Alessandro Stracuzzi is a Toronto-based theatre critic and performance researcher from Italy. He holds an MA in Performance Studies from the University of Milan, and writes about contemporary theatre, performance, and experimental practices. His criticism has appeared in Stage Door, Our Theatre Voice, Stratagemmi, and Fermata Spettacolo.
LEARN MORE