Inner Voices (Le Voci Di Dentro), Barbican

The Italian actor and director Toni Servillo has long been a legend in his home country.  He came to the world’s attention with his lead role in 'The Great Beauty', which last month won a Golden Globe award for best foreign language film. Now we have the opportunity to see this sublime actor, who is equally at home on screen or stage, at the Barbican. 

Servillo plays the lead in Eduardo de Filippo’s rarely staged 'Inner Voices' ('Le Voci di Dentro'). The play was written and first performed in Milan in 1948 and reflects the impoverished times of that immediate post-war era. Its revival seems to be resonating with contemporary audiences also facing financial meltdown and all the unravelling of relationships which that entails.

It is by all accounts a production with a multi-generational cast of celebrated Neopolitan actors. Starring alongside Servillo (who plays Alberto) is his real-life brother, Peppe Servillo, playing Alberto’s brother, Carlo. The fraternal chemistry is said to be transfixing.

The production is brought to us by Italy’s renowned Piccolo Teatro di Milano in collaboration with the Teatro di Roma and Sevillo’s own company Teatro Uniti, which he founded in 1987. It has been on tour in the US, Paris, Madrid and Athens, where it has received rave reviews.

The performance is in Italian with projected English subtitles. Even with the subtitles, however, it is not always easy to follow what is going on and which character is causing what to happen. The bare bones of the plot are that the character of Alberto mistakenly confuses his dream with reality, leading him to accuse the family next door of murdering his friend. Servillo describes acting as a path to self-knowledge. Discussing the play’s meaning, he tole Le Monde: ‘The war changed the nature of man, and we no longer know how to communicate or understand each other.’