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.
The problem with the improbable design – exaggerated by the playful, Looney Tunes-style lighting and sound (Elliot Griggs and Russell Ditchfield respectively) – is that, in the cartoonlike world it evokes, nothing is ever so serious that crushed characters can’t bounce back. This is at odds with Fo and Rame’s scenario, where hilarity is a foil for desolation and builds to a climax of desperation: Margherita (movingly portrayed by Katherine Pearce) failing to imagine a future for the now homeless, jobless friends. Marieke Hardy’s adaptation needs disturbingly few minor additions to make it ring true to our present.
Under Bryony Shanahan’s patchy direction, the five actors work hard to strike a comic tone that chimes with the bubblegum-bright set, yet also engages us with the characters and their dilemmas. After a first-half struggle, they finish on a high note (deserved namechecks to multiple-role-playing Anwar Russell, and Gurjeet Singh as Margherita’s husband, Luigi). Even as we laugh, we cannot help but recognise that, however crazy the action, it’s not as mad as our world, where the pursuit of profit means that the workers who create wealth cannot afford light, heat, rent or food.
