{"id":1730,"date":"2019-11-27T17:33:45","date_gmt":"2019-11-27T17:33:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/?p=1730"},"modified":"2019-11-27T17:33:53","modified_gmt":"2019-11-27T17:33:53","slug":"how-brilliant-are-my-friends-after-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/2019\/11\/how-brilliant-are-my-friends-after-all.html","title":{"rendered":"How Brilliant Are My Friends, After All?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
A scene from My Brilliant Friend Part 1, image by Marc Brenner<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I\u2019ve relished all four volumes of the identity-mysterious\nElena Ferrante\u2019s Neapolitan Novels<\/em>, I was more than willing to sit through\nthe four\/five hour double-bill of the National Theatre\u2019s production of My Brilliant\nFriend<\/em> Parts One and Two \u2013 and today I\u2019ve got the sore bum to prove I finished\nthe drama marathon. I love Naples, from discovering its hardware-shop-front\nrestaurants, to walking its too-sunny streets where flat-dwellers hang their\nfluttering laundry from their high-up balconies. I adore the pizza, the local\nwines, and the commercial building that houses and displays one of the city\u2019s\nthree lesser-known paintings by Caravaggio in the Gallery of Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano at Via Toledo, 185. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

         Somehow the Ferrante\nnovels capture the atmosphere of this ancient city, which wears its emotions on\nits 1950s-fashion sleeves, and can be merry or menacing \u2013 or both at once. Look\ncarefully at Caravaggio\u2019s paintings executed in Naples, and you can catch the\nfrisson of violence still wrought by the Camorra nearly four centuries later. And,\nas Norman Lewis wrote, in his great Naples \u201944<\/em>, \u201cNeapolitans take their\nsex lives very seriously indeed.\u201d Put all this together, relate the story of\npost-War Naples via two female characters, Len\u00f9 and Lila, stir in the nuances\nof social class and upwards mobility, education, real poverty, politics from\nthe Red Brigade to neo-Fascism, sprinkle with period pop-music, bake for a few\ndecades in the publisher\u2019s oven, and you\u2019ve got the matter of My Brilliant\nFriend.<\/em> Of course, you\u2019ve still got the Jane Austen problem: which of Elizabeth\nBennet and Mr D\u2019Arcy represents pride and which prejudice? Is Len\u00f9 the brilliant\none of the pair, or Lila? That\u2019s the unanswered question that is the psychological\ncentre of Ferrante\u2019s stunning fictional quartet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

         April de Angelis has done\nher best. This near-epic script (which must consist chiefly of stage directions\n\u2013 I presume this is why no text seems to be available) is a marvel of compression.\nDirector Melly Still and her set and costume designer, Soutra Gilmour, have\ntaken what they can from this elaborate set of instructions and run with it,\naided greatly by the puppetry guy, Toby Oli\u00e9, and particularly by Tal Yarden,\nwhose video designs do a lot of the narrative heavy-lifting. The anthology of post-War\npop tunes, fashions and politics is satisfying, sometimes exciting,  and the sets, bare, skeletal wooden-staircase\nsteps on casters, do their job \u2013 to the extent that you can imagine yourself in\nthe Neapolitan slums with laundry hanging everywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

         What\u2019s wrong is the dialogue.\nNot the words, but the accents. Two or three other critics have noted that the\ncast has been directed not to attempt a cod-Southern Italian accent. Instead,\nthe large cast who have speaking parts have been told to say their lines using\nthe accents of their (mostly British) birthplaces. Len\u00f9 (the superb Niamh\nCusack), for example, illustrates her rise from \u201cthe neighbourhood\u201d by\nswitching, not from the sound of a Neapolitan underclass dialect, but to a slight,\nand well-educated Irish lilt. Lila, the other heroine who is on the stage most\nof the time, is played supremely well, with passion and guts, by Catherine\nMcCormack \u2013 but her changes of accent were either too various, too difficult or\ntoo subtle for me to detect. The remainder of the cast speak in northern\naccents, or Brummie, or whatever \u2013 you have to be a phonetician to analyse them.\nThat is, if you can hear the differences; or, still worse, if you can hear the\nwords at all. There is, admittedly, a lot of competition from Jon Nicholls\u2019 sound\ndesign, ranging from explosions to gun shots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ok, this is a \u201cshow\u201d production, not a \u201ctell\u201d production, and the verbal aspect of narration is kept to a minimum. Which would be a noble experiment, if the audience were only able to grasp the detail<\/em> of what is going on in front of them.\u00a0 There is a reason that every professional actor is taught to say his lines in Received Pronunciation (or Standard English) \u2013 it is the same reason that (most) BBC radio and television announcers still use RP: the assumption that part of what it is to be a member of a theatre audience in Britain (and, actually, this is also still true of America, Canada, Australia and the rest of the English-speaking world) is the near-universal capacity to understand RP. That is how we comprehend the detail, the particularity, the concreteness of what is happening on the stage before us. There is nothing snobbish about this. It is not about speaking posh; but simply about having a minimum standard of intelligibility. To be a little technical, what we\u2019re talking about here is not merely the question of accent, how words are pronounced; it is also, frequently, dialect \u2013 i.e., almost different languages, with differing lexical elements and idioms, though they are (at least minimally) mutually intelligible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In falling between the two stools of simulated Neapolitan and accent anarchy, this National Theatre production is profoundly disappointing. Here\u2019s a thought experiment: imagine these plays in this production performed to an audience that is composed entirely of people for whom English is their second language or, for that matter, to an all-American audience. English is their first<\/em> language; but can you really imagine that an audience, say, made up wholly of my fellow Harvard PhDs in English, would manage the particulars<\/em> of this long day and evening\u2019s entertainment? The imperatives are two. Not merely \u201conly connect,\u201d but also \u201ccommunicate.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

         A note on the free programme\nleaflet says that \u201csmart caption glasses\u201d will be available for these two\nplays. I asked for a pair on press night, and was sad to be told they were not\nyet available. Sounds to me to be exactly what\u2019s needed!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I\u2019ve relished all four volumes of the identity-mysterious Elena Ferrante\u2019s Neapolitan Novels, I was more than willing to sit through the four\/five hour double-bill of the National Theatre\u2019s production of My Brilliant Friend Parts One and Two \u2013 and today I\u2019ve got the sore bum to prove I finished the drama marathon. I love […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,36,1],"tags":[4630,4632,4627,4628,4629,4631],"class_list":{"0":"post-1730","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-blogroll-2","7":"category-elsewhere","8":"category-uncategorized","9":"tag-april-di-angelis","10":"tag-catherine-mccormack","11":"tag-ferrante","12":"tag-naples","13":"tag-national-theatre","14":"tag-niamh-cusack","15":"entry","16":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-rU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1730"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1730\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1732,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1730\/revisions\/1732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}