Salemme’s homage to De Filippo is already a Christmas classic

The numbers would be enough to speak of a great cultural operation worthy of public service: 20.5 percent share, 3,346,000 spectators to follow the live TV broadcast from the Rai Auditorium in Naples on Rai1 on Boxing Day evening of the show ‘Christmas at the Cupiello house’ directed by Vincenzo Salemme. But it’s not just about that. Great ratings can also be achieved with theater and, above all, with good ideas. The actor and director from Bacoli, who made his debut with Eduardo De Filippo at the age of 18, made a courageous choice (some would define it – and did define it – in his own way as ‘heretical’), to stage and ‘Salemmise’ a text which everyone – absolutely everyone – knows well and links it inextricably with the great playwright who created a historic staging of it for television in 1977 starring the same Eduardo, his son Luca, Pupella Maggio in the role of Concetta and Lina Sastri in that of his daughter Ninuccia. Salemme’s Luca(riello) Cupiello manages to distance itself from Eduardo’s memorable and carved in rock version by offering a different but no less minor version.

As Giulio Baffi writes in Repubblica, Salemme “he chooses to erase the shadows of a comedy that has too many for his taste as an actor who prefers comedy”. A happy choice that gives new life to a work that is not affected by the dust of time, a human comedy of the highest level which with Salemme is enriched with that lightness that Eduardo did not have and which is good for the show. A bit like when another great man, Vittorio De Sica, decided to take another Edwardian masterpiece, ‘Filumena Marturano’ and gave us an immense film like ‘Italian wedding’ with Marcello Mastroianni and Sophia Loren. Salemme, since its Roman debut at the Piccolo Eliseo in the early 1990s with two memorable shows – ‘And outside it snows’ and ‘Pasticceria Bellavista’ – has shown its personal and winning character: combining stylistic height, the depth of characters and the seriousness of the topics covered typical of his master Eduardo De Filippo with a lightness, comedy and taste for ‘nonsense’ that is entirely Neapolitan which was brought to the highest level by Totò.

And so in the ‘Christmas in the Cupiello house’ broadcast by Rai on Boxing Day and much appreciated by the home audience (with inevitable controversy from the ‘purists’ especially on social media) there is a freshness that is inevitably not present in the 1977 comedy starring Edward. The writer Maurizio de Giovanni responded to the critics on Facebook by explaining in his own way, with extreme simplicity and clarity, that “by the grace of God there are no filmed versions of Shakespeare. Otherwise, with every ‘King Lear’ you know what a war of disgusted comparisons”.So clarifying what should be obvious: ‘sacred’ texts can be touched and reviewed, as long as it is done with care, wisdom and intelligence. It’s the only way they can survive the one element that could destroy them: time. Well done Salemme, therefore, in his courageous choice. His ‘Natale in casa Cupiello’ could have a long life on television – and, as long as he acts, also in the theater – and become a classic to be seen on Christmas evening alongside the inevitable (or, objectively, now unbearable) ‘An armchair for two ‘ and ‘The Grinch’.