An everyday situation ratchets into surreal mayhem. Antonia comes home from the supermarket with her friend Margherita bearing news of spontaneous mass refusal to pay for groceries (and her own share of the spoils). In Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s 1974 satire on the capitalist system, this leads to “miracle pregnancies” (male as well as female), murder (or maybe not) and police (or maybe communist) infiltration.
Cécile Trémolières’s design almost steals the show. Vents rise from the floor and yawn, puffing vapour, over the in-the-round stage. An enormous pipe with a metal door set into its closed-off end forms one entrance; opposite, a metal slide, snaking down from the theatre’s balcony, forms the other. Industrial piping marks out the floorplan of a domestic kitchen (chest freezer; table with gas hob) and bedroom (double bed; statue of the Virgin Mary). This wacky setting is supposed to show the modest flat inhabited by Antonia (Samantha Power) and her husband, Giovanni (Roger Morlidge). She has been made redundant; he soon will be. Times are very hard indeed.
