My Brilliant Friend – Parts 1 & 2
Rose Theatre Kingston, High Street, Kingston (020-8174 0090) Until 2 April Running time: 2hrs 30mins each (including interval) Adapted by April De Angelis, from the novels by Elena Ferrante Director: Melly Still
Compressing Elena Ferrante’s four Neapolitan Novels into a stage drama (lasting five hours, over two parts), is a serious theatrical challenge, said Holly Williams on Whatsonstage. com. So all credit to the Rose Theatre Kingston, the adaptor April De Angelis, and director Melly Still for their “huge achievement” in producing “an epic stage show that is absolutely as addictive as the books”. As a fan of the novels, I adored this theatrical take on the story of Lenù and Lila and their six decades of friendship and rivalry. I did wonder, though, whether some theatregoers might find the “salami-slicing of the vast plot – marriages and breakups and children, underlying battles of power and corruption and violence” – somewhat bewildering.
Alas, I did, said Ann Treneman in The Times. This is a complicated story of at least six interlocking Neapolitan families, and (despite being an admirer of the books) I felt like I needed a “giant flow chart superimposed on the backdrop” to work out who was who. Well, I’ve only read the first of the quartet, said Michael Billington in The Guardian, yet I found it all a beguiling “triumph”. Still’s production, and Soutra Gilmour’s design, recreate postwar Italy with “beautiful fluidity”. And the performances (and stamina) of Niamh Cusack and Catherine Mccormack, as Lenù and Lila, are almost “beyond praise”.
Both are astonishing, agreed Susannah Clapp in The Observer. One moment Mccormack’s Lila is “the swankiest person on stage, in big shades and a gauzy headscarf à la Sophia Loren”. The next, she is the most “woebegone: gaunt and rawboned, hauling the carcass of a skinned animal across a factory floor”. Cusack brings her “lit-up intensity” to Lenù, the books’ narrator, who uses her cleverness to “escape poverty, family, thuggery”. It is a mark of their achievement – and that of this “fleet, sleek” and “noirish” production – that they pull off the “seemingly impossible”, said Claire Allfree in The Daily Telegraph: “despite the almost unquantifiable number of hours I have now spent in the company of Lila and Lenù, I left this wanting still more”.