Jealous Women is the first play written by Goldoni entirely in Venetian dialect. The attentions of the author are focussed on a confined area of the city, a neighbourhood, a specific period – the last few days of the carnival, and on a single social class of shopkeepers and merchants, petit bourgeoisie on the brink of poverty.

“It is a closed world – explains Giorgio Sangati – claustrophobic, without contact with the outside world, self-referential, marked - more than by the economical crises - by a moral drift that drags the protagonists into a vortex of pathological gambling, in a whirlwind of raging jealousy and envy. The rapport between characters is miserable, hypocritical; relationships are corroded, mouldy, permanently conditioned by money; the intimacy is squalid, tainted by insults and physical abuse. The cult of money and an obsessive dependence on gambling reigns sovereign: in fact fate is the only thing that can relieve the anxiety of the fall (back) into misery, but it is merely temporary relief for a world whose fate has already been written. No-one works, but energy is wasted, everyone is busy, chasing each other, consuming each other, without finding a way out, as though in a labyrinth where people wander aimlessly, continuously returning to the point of departure”.

In a compulsive montage Goldoni alternates interiors and exteriors, highs and lows, the private and the public: one senses in the pièce a disconnection, disorder, the entropy of a culture which has definitively lost its centrality. The small square – a place of reunion, conflict, but also of celebration – is replaced by the terribly glum Ridotto (illegal private gambling club) where everyone, protected by the anonymity of their masks, can spy on the others while hoping not to be recognised.

“It is an anomalous, dark and silent Venice – continues the director – almost deserted. Even the Carnival remains in the background, kept off stage. That celebration par excellence for the changing of roles, in which one can pretend to be that which they are not, is unable to involve a class which can change only within its own lack of moral values. The only (sadistic) pleasure for the protagonists seems to derive from the contemplation of the misfortune of others. It is the triumph of a suicidal individualism: it is no coincidence that this generation has no children, at most apprentices trained to face a world which pulls no punches”.