I am normally wary of novel adaptations but this version of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet is something of a triumph. April De Angelis has skilfully condensed the story into a two-part, five-and-a-half-hour play spanning nearly 50 years. But bald statistics don’t do justice to Melly Still’s production, which combines an intimate study of female friendship with a panoramic picture of postwar Italy.
I’ve read only the first book of the quartet and can vouch for the fact that you don’t need to be a Ferrante follower to get the point. What we see is a memory play in which Lenu recalls the unpredictable pattern of her lifelong relationship with Lila, who has mysteriously disappeared. In many ways, the two women are radically different. Lenu, a porter’s daughter, turns her childhood studiousness to good account by becoming an academic and novelist. But where Lenu is always slightly detached, Lila, a shoemaker’s daughter, is wild, impulsive, reckless. “You write novels,” Lila tells her friend, “I create novels with my own hands.” Yet the two women are forever bound together by their impoverished Neapolitan childhood and by their belief in female agency.
De Angelis makes clear the story’s feminist message. “Until we write our own texts,” declares Lenu, “we won’t know who we are”. But, while the picture of postwar Italy as a patriarchy is historically convincing, it means there are few likable men in the story: Lenu’s husband is a patronising professor, the lover she and Lila independently share is a two-timer and Neapolitan life is dominated by a pair of vicious Camorra thugs. But what comes across is the fractured intensity of the relationship between the two women.
Even though we see Lila through Lenu’s eyes and the pair are often physically separated, we feel their fortunes are indissolubly linked. Still’s production and Soutra Gilmour’s design also re-create the Italian background with beautiful fluidity. White sheets are used to evoke courtyard labour, the Ischian sea and a rape. When the child Lila is thrown out of a window, we see nothing more than a falling smock and a descending bundle. The murder of a local loan shark is symbolised by the stealthy removal of a dagger from a headdress. Music, too, is adroitly used, whether it be 1950s pop or Purcell’s haunting creation of Dido’s Lament: a reminder that Lila was the first of the two friends to read The Aeneid, at a precociously tender age.
As Lenu and Lila respectively, Niamh Cusack – who is on stage virtually throughout – and Catherine McCormack are beyond praise. Cusack conveys all of Lenu’s doggedness and determination, while showing how she grows into a fiercely independent woman. McCormack, meanwhile, implies there is always an inner fury in Lila, even when she becomes the successful head of a computer company.
The two actors suggest neither is complete without the other, and are admirably supported by Justin Avoth as Lenu’s condescending husband, Emily Wachter as her vindictive mother and Victoria Moseley as a gangster’s moll. It makes for a long day but a richly rewarding one.
•At the Rose theatre, Kingston, until 2 April. Box office: 020-8174 0090.
