Filumena, Theatre Royal Windsor review - Mozartian marriage comedy with pasta sauce

Of all the ingenues in all the world of golden TV sitcom, Felicity Kendal was the most innocent, the most wicked, the most deceptive, with an amaretto voice that wheedled like a child and seduced like a witch. Half a century on, there must be a heck of a portrait in her attic because at 78 Kendal displays intact all her qualities - including that elfin prettiness - in a glorious star performance as Filumena, the mother-of-three in want of a husband in Eduardo di Filippo's classic comedy.

As it was written the year she was born, 1946, who stands up better in time, the actor or the play? Kendal has it by a distance, but with her magnetism on board the mannered comedy scrubs up enjoyably in Sean Matthias's new production, which will surely give plenty of cosy pleasure on its tour around the south-east.

Note to the skim-reader - this is not the same as Philomena, the sad Irish lost-child story with Judi Dench. Filumena is her opposite, as rather than looking for children she already has three, and it's a legal father for them that she's wrangling. A former prostitute, she has been living unofficially with pompous, unfaithful but rich Don Domenico for decades but could only get him to marry her by pretending to be dying. (Domenico: "I thought the quicker I marry her, the quicker she'll be dead.") 

Her secret motive is to legitimise her grown sons, whom she has supported by stealing the Don's money, since one of them - she won't say which - is his. Domenico's test is whether he will forgive his lifelong partner's tricks as serving family values and accept all three children as equal in the family, without ever knowing which (if any) is his.

Filumena is a combination of The Marriage of Figaro's neglected Countess and the ferociously maternal Queen of the Night

Filumena's ruthless tactics aren't unlikely in the poverty circumstances of Naples that Di Filippo gently reminds us of, but the play is to be enjoyed as a Mozartian comedy with pasta sauce. Filumena herself is a combination of The Marriage of Figaro's neglected Countess and the ferociously maternal Queen of the Night of The Magic Flute. There's a cheeky maid, a comedy lawyer, and (surely made for a tenor-baritone-bass trio) three adult men, all running their businesses and lives successfully, who their absent mother thinks need a new surname. 

In 1964 Sophia Loren starred in a popular film of the play, Marriage Italian-Style, and it's amusing and disconcerting how well Kendal, the archetypical cute blonde, tans up to a naughty brown imp with a magnificent head of Loren-esque black curls, tucking her bare toes under her white silk gown and wriggling into the cushions.

Her mini-ness is baked into the production's comedy, since she is roughly half the size the splendid Matthew Kelly playing Don Domenico, her marriage prey, with gargantuan smugness and entitlement (pictured right, with Jamie Hogarth). When they face up to each other, Kelly winces from his great height as Kendal skewers him with her eyes, and there's a proper erotic snap between one who enjoys hunting and the other being hunted.

But I admired even more Kendall's pinpoint timing and comic inflection in a role that's a river of words, as Filumena gradually comes clean on all her convolutions, excuses, deceptions, motivations and final satisfaction. In live theatre there's nowhere to hide, and this is a tour de force of comedy playing.

The translation by the wits Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall overflows with great old-school lines. Filumena to Domenico on their original relationship: "You can't complain. You got the same service as everyone else. But that was then. Now I'm your wife." Domenico: "She's not a woman, she's an armoured tank."

And there are some nice production varnishes on the rococo sexual politics. Poignant soundcues from Verdi's La Traviata amp up the operatic echoes (imagine Violetta with three secret sons...?). The religious objets on Domenico's walls are mocked by the half-naked nymph frolicking solo in the ceiling fresco. The decor by Morgan Large (Sister Act, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Windsor's Frank and Percy) is picturesque and substantial, with glass verandah, chandeliers, curly-legged furniture, delectable silk dresses and pretty shoes, and a fine array of male suitings and braces - to be enjoyed particularly in the scene of the three sons' mutual contest of oneupmanship that, being strutting Neapolitans, rapidly turns into fisticuffs. And who wouldn't warm to the plumber son who says, "If I've got a spanner in my hand I've got a song in my mouth... Have you got a spanner?" 

Below: Filumena (Kendall) and her sons, played by Gavin Fowler, George Banks and Fabrizio SantinoHere and there, deft stage movement creates evocative little tableaux, with Sarah Twomey persistently catching our eye as Lucia, the maid - as maids do in Mozartian comedy. (She was outstanding in Windsor's previous show, Accolade, too.) In sum, park your modern sensitivities at the door and enjoy some clever old-style mirth with a captivating star turn at its centre.

• Filumena, at Theatre Royal Windsor till 19 October, tours to Guildford's Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Cambridge Arts Theatre, Bath Theatre Royal and the Richmond Theatre, till 23 November