Stratford Festival’s ‘Grand Magic’ mines existentialism, absurdism and nihilism to cast a riotous spell

Grand Magic

By Eduardo De Filippo, translated by John Murrell and Donato Santeramo, directed by Antoni Cimolino. Until Sept. 29 at the Stratford Festival’s Tom Patterson Theatre, 111 Lakeside Dr., Stratford. stratfordfestival.ca and 1800-567-1600

STRATFORD—To helm the Stratford Festival is to promote Shakespeare, no question. But throughout his time with the company, artistic director Antoni Cimolino has also become a champion of Eduardo De Filippo, the prolific Italian theatremaker whose works often blend satire with pointed social critique.

Cimolino made his solo directorial debut here in 1997 with De Filippo’s “Filumena,” starring his mentor and then artistic director Richard Monette. Five years ago, he staged the playwright’s popular post-Second World War comedy “Napoli Milionaria!”

This season, Cimolino has set his sights on one of De Filippo’s lesser-known works: “Grand Magic,” which opened Saturday at the festival’s Tom Patterson Theatre.

Any lingering doubt that Cimolino is one of the foremost interpreters of De Filippo’s oeuvre in the English language should now be erased with this production of the 1948 tragicomedy. It’s an all-round feast for the eyes, featuring vibrant direction, gorgeous production designs and a stalwart 27-member cast, led by Geraint Wyn Davies and Gordon S. Miller, that perfectly captures De Filippo’s signature style, accentuating the juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy to their heightened extremes.

In short, it’s a spellbinding production, one that could only be mounted by a creative team intimately familiar with De Filippo’s works.

“Grand Magic” follows illusionist Otto Marvuglia (Davies) and Calogero Di Spelta (Miller), an arrogant vacationer at a Neapolitan seaside resort whose wife Marta (Beck Lloyd), stuck in an unhappy marriage, volunteers to participate in one of Otto’s acts. The magician uses his skill — more as a con man than an illusionist — to make Marta disappear from the sarcophagus into which she entered.

The act goes awry, however, when she fails to reappear. To cover his botched trick, Otto hands Calogero an ornate Japanese box. “If you open that box believing in your wife’s faithfulness, you will see her,” the charlatan explains. “However, if you open it while doubting her, you will never see your wife again.”

But Calogero doesn’t have faith, so he can’t bring himself to open the box. Minutes turn to hours, hours to days, days to years.

There’s a very real — and rather obvious — reason why Marta has vanished, as revealed early on. Yet Calogero fails to confront the truth and with it, the pain. Instead, he’s convinced, by Otto but also himself, that he is stuck in a game, caught in one of Otto’s hypnotic spells: once it’s over, he will find himself back at the resort with Marta by his side as if no time has passed.

On a perfunctory level, De Filippo’s play delves into literal magic. Dig deeper, however, and this is a tale about the magic of the mind — the illusion of delusion.

It’s not just Calogero who conjures an alternate narrative to escape his current reality. In Otto, De Filippo also paints a man slipping further from reality with each trick he performs. A second-rate magician, he and his reluctant wife-turned-assistant Zaira (Sarah Orenstein) have a relationship on the rocks, wasting their days performing at Italian resorts. But Otto is convinced he can continue with this life indefinitely.

And in a tangential and somewhat underdeveloped side plot, there’s Otto’s sidekick Arturo Taddei (David Collins), who, too, is as hopelessly deluded, unable to accept his daughter’s (Germaine Konji) undisclosed terminal illness.

This may all sound like a dramatic soap opera, but “Grand Magic” really isn’t. De Filippo seamlessly weaves this earnestness with his absurdist humour, framed around Otto’s attempts to keep Calogero in his unlikely charade. A second-act scene in which a police investigator (Emilio Vieira, nailing the farcical humour) storms Otto’s home, with Calogero in tow, is pure comedic gold.

The play’s style is not unlike that of “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” where comedy isn’t merely present for comedy’s sake, but serves as a means to explore broader philosophical ideas of existentialism, nihilism and realism.

That this balancing act generally succeeds — perhaps the absurdism is pushed too far, but what can you expect with a midcentury European play? — is credit to the sharp new translations by Donato Santeramo and the late great Canadian playwright John Murrell. Cimolino’s direction is equally compelling, making fine use of the Tom Patterson Theatre’s extended thrust stage and Lorenzo Savoini’s colourful sets and lighting designs, capturing the complete world of postwar Naples, from the resort’s breezy atmosphere to the decaying grandeur of Otto and Calogero’s residences.

The ensemble cast never misses a beat and is uniformly excellent (despite some odd choices to have certain characters sport a distinct New York accent). Davies and Miller, in particular, draw on the various facets of their world-weary characters: hard-edged, pitiful, lost, clinging to their illusions to cope with a reality which they cannot accept.

If the conclusion to De Filippo’s play is particularly bleak, it’s nonetheless thought-provoking. Calogero, now alone onstage having fallen further into madness, seems destined to continue in this state. Will he ever find liberation from this never-ending game? Or is this his liberation from a world he cannot endure? De Filippo doesn’t offer easy answers.