The Inner Voices are the voices of conscience and make this one of De Filippo’s most moralistic works which only on the surface seems like a farce in typically Neapolitan fashion but, with its ambiguities and unanswered questions, enters Pirandello territory.
Mignone, Eduardo De Filippo, p. 98.
De Filippo’s play is no intellectual dialectic, but a warm effusion of feelings in which the Pirandellian disquisitions about truth and pretense, illusion and reality, are replaced by a Neapolitan way of life which reflects the same relativistic, existential problems.
Mario Mignone, Eduardo De Filippo, Boston, Twayne, 1984, p. 98.
While the parody reminds one of Pirandello’s Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore, the protagonist Pasquale bears a striking resemblance to Pirandello’s Enrico IV.
Harold Acton, Eduardo De Filippo, “The London Magazine”, giugno 1962, p. 55.
Eduardo’s success is due to the fact that he reflects the experiences of his public and establishes a closer contact with it than his predecessors. [...] As Henry James said of Coquelin, he shows “a mastery of that mixture of the appeal to the pity of things with the appeal to their absurdity” which succeeds with the Italians as well as with the French. This should also succeed with the English, and I hope that Eduardo’s company will soon bring Naples to London.
Bentley, “Eduardo de Filippo and the Neapolitan Theatre,” p. 122.
Here is an actor more likely – for demonstrable historical and geographic reasons – to be heir of commedia dell’arte than any other important performer now living and that his style is distinctly different from anything one expected. It is a realistic style.
Bentley, “Eduardo de Filippo and the Neapolitan Theatre,” p. 122.
[i primi sketches eduardiani eduardiani] They would represent incidents in the life of the little man, the povero diavolo.
Eric Bentley, “Eduardo de Filippo and the Neapolitan Theatre,” The Kenyon Review 1 (Winter, 1951) p.122.
The nearest they ever got to this is probably that they sometimes wrote their lines, the script being the fruit of a collaboration between various members of the cast. [...] Eduardo De Filippo began his career as an actor doing this sort of writing.
Harold Acton, “Eduardo De Filippo,” The London Magazine, giugno 1962, p.
He wears a corrugated mask of careworn comedy pierced by smouldering heavy-lidded eyes [...] it is the last mask surviving from the Commedia dell’Arte – that of Pulcinella grown older, sadder and wiser.
Bentley, “Eduardo De Filippo and the Neapolitan Theatre,” p. 121-122.
Eduardo on stage is an astonishment. For five minutes or so he may be a complete let-down. This is not acting at all, we cry, above all it is not Italian acting! Voice and body are so quiet. Pianissimo. No glamour, no effusion of brilliance. No attempt to lift the role off the ground by oratory and stylization, no attempt to thrust it at us by force of personality.
Giorgio Strehler, contributo a Eduardo. Documento in occasione dell’ottantesimo compleanno di Eduardo De Filippo, tributo a cura di Umberto Serra, “Il Mattino”, 24 Maggio 1980.
grande autore di teatro nazional-popolare, radicato nella lingua e nel costume di una parte del nostro mondo, che diventa – proprio perchè parte ben individuata e ben definita – patrimonio universale.
