The Stratford Festival Review: Antoni Cimolino brings the love, jealousy, and buried hurt of Eduardo De Filippo’s Neapolitan family drama to the table
By Ross
Watching a family argue when everyone in the room can see what the problem is except the people actually having the argument is high-stakes drama. It is fascinating to watch, but complicated for me to simply sit back and take in. My psychotherapy brain does not always know when it is supposed to remain turned off, so while I was watching Antoni Cimolino’s production of Saturday, Sunday, Monday by Eduardo De Filippo at the Stratford Festival’s Avon Theatre, I found myself leaning in, trying to understand the familial dynamics unfolding in front of me from an interpersonal psychodynamic perspective. I could almost hear my Italian bestie Antonio whispering in my ear that this was what it was like in his household growing up, but it is far removed from where and how I grew up. In a way, I wish my Canadian family were a bit more Italian, where love, jealousy, and pride were engaged with so openly and passionately. But what I did recognize was the avoidance. Beneath all the food, noise, affection, and argument is a family that has become so deeply accustomed to not saying what it means that simply speaking the truth seems to require a continuous series of strong pokes to the gut delivered by many over an entire long weekend.
As we take our seats, the live making of a big pot of ragù becomes part of that theatrical language. Its aroma and preparation extend the family ritual beyond what we can simply see, filling the theatre with an idea of home that feels both intimate and communal. The characters arrive with enormous personalities and even larger emotional baggage, and Cimolino gives his strongest performers room to dig into the bitterness, hurt, and grief beneath all the theatrical behaviour. Graham Abbey’s Giuseppe “Peppino” Priore and Rose Napoli’s Rosa Priore form the gravitational centre of the production, playing a husband and wife who clearly love one another while spending an extraordinary amount of energy refusing to acknowledge that truth. Their relationship becomes a complicated dance of leaning out and hoping the other person will finally have the courage to lean in with curiosity. Abbey finds the pride and woundedness beneath Peppino’s jealousy, while Napoli gives Rosa the emotional intelligence of someone who has spent years trying to keep a family functioning while quietly absorbing its damage.
Seana McKenna (StratFest’s Les Belles-Soeurs) as Aunt Amelia “Meme” Priore shares the space with these two and makes the household feel fuller simply by being there. She is a captivating presence, while Gordon S. Miller (StratFest’s Hedda Gabler) as “The Accountant” neighbour and his wife Elena, played lovingly by Michelle Giroux (StratFest’s The Tempest), bring their own histories, energy, and tensions into the family’s orbit. The dynamic among these adults is as complex as that ragù, unknowingly adding to the chaos that is happening around the central couple. With years of resentment, attachment, loyalty, and grief simmering beneath the surface, we find ourselves feeling for these people deeply, because they understand the importance of what is at stake, even when they cannot quite figure out how to help the central couple reach it.
The younger family members reveal that this is not simply Peppino and Rosa’s problem. They have inherited the behaviour without necessarily understanding that they have inherited it. The family’s language of avoidance, deflection, and emotional complication has already begun passing into the next generation. Roberto and Maria Carolina are the least important of these relationships beyond the structural ideas they help establish. Their invitation to the Sunday meal could almost have been lost in the translation without taking much emotional weight with it. Emilio Vieira’s Rocco Priore supplies some of the flashier energy and Maher Sinno’s Federico Serretta unfurls the desperation attached to being the fiancé to Giulianella (Katarina Fiallos). The elder, Antonio Piscopo, Rosa’s father, the grandfather to these young adults, portrayed by Rod Beattie (StratFest’s Henry VIII), never carries quite the same emotional weight.
Around them, the production keeps adding people to the table. Geraint Wyn Davies’s flamboyant Raffaele Priore, Josue LaBoucane’s overly protected Attilio, Jenna-Lee Hyde’s outspoken Virginia the maid, and Liam Tobin’s brutish Michele, brother to Virginia, add plenty of comic energy around the edges, even if they contribute less nutritional value to the meal. Still, with so many people coming and going around this table, it is almost astonishing that the central theme never gets completely lost in the crowd as the ensemble continually creates a convincing sense of a family in which everyone has a history.
Then, in Act Two, everyone finally sits around the table, the food is served, and the room falls into a different kind of quiet. They talk while marvelling at what has been prepared, but the production wisely allows the moment to breathe without insisting that every piece of idle conversation needs to be heard. Music and sound take over, giving the moment some texture and aroma. In a play that has no fear of being loud, dramatic, and emotionally extravagant, that silence becomes its own form of conversation. The Sunday dinner finally becomes the place where all those carefully stored ingredients are tossed together and then come flying out. “To hear or not to hear” becomes the almost Shakespearean question, alongside the equally difficult problem of whether to say what needs to be said. Peppino’s jealousy and withdrawal have created a wound that Rosa has spent too long trying to accommodate, but the wound was inflicted long before that, in a casual remark made about a meal made by Maria Carolina (Celia Aloma), the wife of Roberto (Jakob Ehman), the eldest son of Rosa and Peppino.
We become witnesses to the emotional results that come from watching two people who understand each other deeply become almost incapable of reaching one another. Cimolino allows the conflict to remain big and theatrical without losing sight of the ordinary human pain underneath it. The play can wave its arms in great arcs from the terrace, filling the household with anger as arguments spill across the rooms, yet it also understands the power of a pause, a look, or an unanswered question. The pacing occasionally slows to an old man’s stroll, and there are stretches when the emotional complications circle the same territory in big dramatic gestures for longer than I wanted them to. Still, the structural unfolding keeps pulling us forward because the stakes are both enormous and deeply personal. We want, with all our hearts, for these two people to stop performing their grievances long enough to actually see each other.
Douglas Paraschuk’s set creates a family home that feels thoroughly lived in, giving all this emotional activity a physical world in which to unfold. The rooms accommodate the rituals of cooking, eating, visiting, arguing, and waiting, while the design also gives Cimolino plenty of space to let the family’s energy ricochet around the household, although the depth of the kitchen felt thin compared to the other spaces. Francesca Callow’s costumes help establish the hierarchy within the family, while Michael Walton’s lighting and Wayne Kelso and Ranil Sonnadara’s music and sound design shape the atmosphere around them. The production understands that this home is not merely a backdrop. It is where these people have accumulated their histories, their habits, and all the things they have never quite managed to say.
But it is the three-day structure that gives the production its underlying rhythm and weight. Saturday is preparation, Sunday is the explosion, and Monday arrives with the possibility of looking at the wreckage in the morning light and finding their way forward. Food runs alongside family throughout, and the Sunday meal becomes the place where everything that has been withheld finally gets served, and Monday morning becomes the time to eat the leftovers as they try to make sense of it all. The arguments can seem insignificant, or even ridiculous if we only listen to their surface details, or enormously important if we pay attention to what each person is actually trying to say. That tension between what is spoken and what is actually being communicated sits at the heart of the play, and it gives the domestic comedy its emotional weight.
The production is laid out like a grand dining table, and its deep nostalgia for family ritual has teeth, mainly because these rituals carry decades of emotional history. Cooking, eating, visiting, teasing, arguing, and gathering together are all expressions of love here, even when the people performing them seem incapable of saying so directly. After his superb production of De Filippo’s Grand Magic, Cimolino, in his final directorial project as Artistic Director, gives the production an additional sense of occasion, but the real achievement is his ability to keep the production’s focus on the people inside this particular home and the things they have never quite managed to tell one another.
By Monday morning, the question is no longer simply whether Peppino and Rosa can forgive each other. It is whether two people who have spent so much time protecting themselves from hurt can finally allow themselves to be seen clearly and to speak honestly to one another. That is where the emotional heart of Saturday, Sunday, Monday lies. Forgiveness, we see clearly, requires the courage to be seen, to listen, and to speak honestly.. All the food, noise, jealousy, comedy, and domestic chaos have been building toward that possibility. The ragù has been prepared and, somewhat wonderfully, served at intermission. The arguments have exhausted everyone, yet the household has somehow survived this particular storm. But surviving the weekend is not the same thing as repairing what has been broken.
And perhaps that is why the production kept pulling me back toward the same thought I had when I first walked into this very Italian household from the very Canadian one I brought with me. The difficult work is not simply loving someone. These people clearly love one another. The difficult work is finding the courage to listen, to speak plainly, and to stop asking another person to guess what is happening inside you. In my psychotherapy work, I know how basic that sounds, but in a family like this one, it can feel almost revolutionary. Cimolino’s Saturday, Sunday, Monday, translated and adapted by Cimolino and Donato Santeramo, takes a crowded home, fills it with food, history, and people who are desperately trying not to say what they feel while playing emotional games that aren’t joyful at all. The Stratford Festival brilliantly gathers all these people around our table and lets us watch what happens when the possibility of speaking the truth finally arrives. Perhaps what this family needs is not another argument, another explanation, or another attempt to be right. Perhaps they simply need to find their way back to each other and lean in. Because after all that food, all that noise, all that love, and all that avoidance, the most important word left on the table is ascoltare.
