It starts with a carefree round of cards and has some crowd-pleasing illusions but Eduardo De Filippo’s Grand Magic (1948) is as much about the ways we deceive ourselves as we do others. Staging his third of De Filippo’s plays for Ontario’s Stratford festival, artistic director Antoni Cimolino has conjured up a sophisticated and intellectually stimulating production that balances daft comedy with poignancy. Like the best of tricks, it catches you off guard.
We are in a seaside hotel whose guests include the mean-spirited Calogero, his neglected wife Marta and her paramour Mariano. Calogero’s own faithfulness is questioned when the magician Otto puts on an entertainment in which he makes Marta disappear. With a playful awareness of theatre’s own artifice, we see her secretly depart in a speedboat with her lover – their feet sticking below the hull as they scamper away.
But Otto insists that Marta is now trapped within a box – an echo of the way her husband is said to keep her locked in a room. She will reappear only if Calogero opens the box believing in her fidelity. He is left, for years, refusing to properly examine his marriage and accept that he, not Otto, has made Marta disappear.
Stunning designs by Lorenzo Savoini (set and lighting) and Francesca Callow (costumes) accentuate surface appearances, from shimmering platters to slick pomade, before unvarnished truths are revealed, while Ranil Sonnadera’s sound and Wayne Kelso’s music heighten the escapist appeal of the seaside.
Otto arrives in a three-piece suit, calling himself professor and grandly referring to his “experiments”. In private he is as down at heel as the vaudeville troupe in Fellini’s Variety Lights (1950). Theatrical performance is shown to be a kind of escapology from real life for those on both sides of the footlights.
Geraint Wyn Davies is splendid as Otto, whose words – in John Murrell and Donato Santeramo’s elegant translation – are described as spoken from his fingertips, but who grasps desperately at his cheque from Mariano. The magician’s self-deception mirrors that of Calogero, equally well played by Gordon S Miller, who gradually unravels from coiffured arrogance to dishevelment, his fringe flopping like the spaghetti he eats with his hands.
Otto, too, has an unappreciated and unfaithful wife whose barbed lines are witheringly delivered by Sarah Orenstein. Just as the magician’s Pirandellian patter risks discombobulation, the play is given fresh legs. In bursts Emilio Vieira as a befuddled cop who is wisely advised to not worry too much about the plot.
The emotional impact would be greater if more time were spent with Calogero and Marta at the opening and is weakened by an unsatisfying plot line about his associate’s daughter. But the cast are uniformly excellent in a production that is as sumptuous as this new playhouse.
When the smoke clears, the play’s title becomes something of an oxymoron. Even the most wondrous of appearances conceals a prosaic reality – the question is whether you choose to start scratching the surface.
At the Tom Patterson theatre, Stratford, Ontario, until 29 September. The Stratford festival runs until 29 October. Chris Wiegand’s trip was provided by the festival.
