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Marina Carr's italophone adaptation of Carlo Goldoni's La Locandiera relocates a Florentine inn to a Dublin Italian restaurant, reframing an 18th-century comedy as a feminist tragedy about misogyny and intimate violence at the Abbey Theatre.
Mirandolina review: Marina Carr updates 18th-century comedy as feminist tragedy with keen moral purpose. Marina Carr's adaptation of Carlo Goldoni's 18th-century comedy La Locandiera relocates the action from a Florentine inn to a present-day Dublin Italian restaurant run by the titular heroine and her stepbrother.
The text has been translated into Italian by Monica Capuani and is performed with English surtitles at the Abbey Theatre as part of an international coproduction tied to Ireland's presidency of the Council of the European Union. The italophone staging, which has previously toured Italy and Croatia, conjures an engagingly dreamlike alternate reality, with cross-cultural currents emphasising the universality of Mirandolina's central themes of misogyny and intimate violence.
The tone is established early as the twentysomething heroine, played by a forceful Gaja Masciale, struggles to fend off the attentions of two obnoxious middle-aged barflies. Andrea Tich's Alba restricts himself to boastful cajolery, while Denis Fasolo's Fiori attempts to give Mirandolina a Cartier bracelet in a gesture carrying a clear manipulative charge. Drunken lechery escalates into physical harassment until Mirandolina strikes Fiori on the nose.
Standing aloof is another regular, Riccardo Gamba's Rip, who is contemptuous of the others' antics yet gripped by his own sullen frustrations. Once the two reprobates have staggered out, he suggests that Mirandolina enjoys seeing men grovel over her. Here lies a seething covert form of misogyny, which the play suggests is ultimately more dangerous than Fiori's overt aggression. Mirandolina does not fully repudiate Rip's slur and later vows to humiliate him by making him fall in love with her.
Having kept the bracelet, she also toys with Fiori's desires. The restaurant is on the brink of insolvency, and continuous consumption of booze and cocaine helps explain why everyone's judgment is skewed. Mirandolina longs to write a PhD about Virginia Woolf, but finding a room of her own remains an unimaginable prospect. After the interval, Giancarlo Previati supplies fleeting comic relief as Mirandolina's great-grandfather, who relates how he weaned his customers off potatoes when he founded the restaurant.
Even this anecdote shifts in a horrifying direction, reinforcing how Carr has reframed Goldoni's comedy as a feminist tragedy with a keen sense of moral purpose. The overall effect is somewhat unbalanced, however, because the extreme misogyny that consumes most of the male characters is treated as an eternal, essentially unexplained feature of existence.
At two hours and forty-five minutes including the interval, the production feels rather baggy in places, and the surtitles are positioned too high to easily follow both the action and the dialogue. Katie Davenport's stylish yet down-at-heel design, overhung by dim striplights, contributes to an absorbingly haunted mood that lingers despite the play's structural unevenness
Mirandolina Marina Carr Abbey Theatre Carlo Goldoni La Locandiera
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