Il delitto di Via dell’Orsina

A dark comedy of great wit, energy and fun. L’Affaire de la rue de Lourcine is one of the best-known single-act plays of Eugène Labiche, a bourgeois French dramatist and father of vaudeville whose prolific mastery of his craft could reveal the ridiculous that had been swept under the carpets of the bourgeois class. In this Italian adaptation, two men, one a rich, sophisticated nobleman (Massimo Dapporto), the other a gruff, vulgar proletarian (Antonello Fassari), wake up in the same bed, hands dirty, pockets full of coal, neither able to remember anything of the night before. In that day’s newspaper, they learn of the death of a young coal woman and decide that they must have been the ones who committed the crime. Our two protagonists, willing to do anything to avoid guilt and maintain appearances, have no choice but to get rid of the evidence. In the words of Shammah, this brilliant work is a sort of “reflection on the senselessness and absurdity of life”.