My Brilliant Friend

adapted by April De Angelis from Elena Ferrante's novels

seen at the Rose Theatre, Kingston upon Thames on 23 March 2017

Melly Still directs Niamh Cusack as Elena and Catherine McCormack as Lila in this two-part adaptation of the four Neapolitan novels of Elena Ferrante, with a supporting cast of ten actors taking all the other parts. The set - an all-purpose and inventive use of the whole Rose Theatre stage and the galleries behind it - and costumes are designed by Soutra Gilmour.

This is a compelling piece of theatre with blisteringly good performances from the two women whose careers and experiences diverge drastically from their childhood in post-war Naples. The adaptation of four dense and complex novels into about five and a half hours of playing time is extremely ambitious, but it is triumphantly realised. It is clearly an adaptation from another medium, rather than a newly devised play, but nonetheless it is dramatically sound and intensely involving. I have not (yet) read the books, so I cannot comment on what has been sacrificed or simplified, but as a sheer piece of theatre I found it totally engrossing. I'm not entirely clear on the relations of some of the families - not helped here by the inevitable doubling of roles - but in the heat of the moment it was not much of a disadvantage.

The focal point is the friendship of Elena, the girl who is educated and who eventually becomes a writer, and Lila, the equally (if not more) bright girl whose parents refuse her an education, and who struggles as a survivor in the harsh world of lower-class Naples, with its dominating and often violent and criminal men. The friendship remains strong though it is riven by jealousies arising from different paths taken and rivalries in love. There are several moments when Elena's success as a thinker and writer seems to stem from her appropriation of her friend's ideas, and a particularly painful scene when a press photographer enthuses over Lila's daughter and whirls Elena into a photo session with her instead of with her own uncooperative daughter. Such blurrings often occur but we are left to draw our own conclusions about how galling this must be for one or other of the women - the resultant tensions are the more powerful for being usually unspoken or for spilling out over side issues. This makes for a very convincing portrait of a friendship, messy, contradictory, but despite all immensely strong and important.

Around them swirl all sorts of characters, many from a small number of local families ('the neighbourhood') whose roles are entrenched and whose power dynamics shape everyone's lives from early childhood onwards.  Part of the tension between the two women arises from Elena's apparent escape from their shared background; her well-intentioned interventions in adulthood are often mocked or resented by those left behind. But Lila's different trajectory has its own costs; fighting corruption and oppression at any level in this society is dangerous and demoralising.

There are wonderfully subtle patterns and resonances in this piece, and to see the two parts in one day as I did is to be thoroughly immersed in a fascinating and absorbing view of the human condition. The very different forms that a woman's struggle for autonomy can take are strikingly well-observed. Many of the men are predictably unsympathetic, their own struggles and masculine self-image inevitably bound up with issues of dominance that lead to self-righteous acts of violence. But even the men who claim to have some sympathy for a woman's autonomy, really don't appreciate the problem, which in Elena's case coalesces about the need for a woman writer to have (as Virginia Woolf insisted) a room of her own. Man's solution to the problem of dealing with shared domestic responsibility is, apparently, either to deny that it might be shared, or else to employ a housekeeper, and to use a grandmother for childcare - which of course only displaces the problem, rather than solving it.

All this we see - we don't have to hear any tirades about it it. Indeed, one of the many virtues of My Brilliant Friend is that the audience is not hectored or preached at. The story we are witness to is strong enough on its own to force us to make our own connections and to draw our own conclusions. As is often the case in even the closest of relationships, there remains something unknowable about the other person. We  therefore, as much as the characters themselves, create provisional stories to account for the experiences we witness, and often these harden into firm 'facts' which shape our memories and allow us to feel almost affronted when they are contradicted or denied. From one point of view Elena seems easily prey to idealised or romanticised memories of important emotional events, while Lila in contrast seems almost callously forgetful of the shared past, especially insofar as it might distract her from the tough business of surviving the present. Who is to say who is at fault?