Over sixteen thousand spectators crowded the auditorium over the course of last season, celebrating the extraordinary success of a play - the first production by the Piccolo Teatro to be directed by Emma Dante - of an exceptional severity. The large stage of the Teatro Strehler thus sees the return of the procession of primitive and fragile creatures from a fleeing community, a silent patrol taking its first uncertain steps, with no way to escape, but which imagines, illudes, fights, and vibrates, undefended, with life. They are illuminated under the gaze of the director (and writer), a woman of theatre, who shapes the living body of the person who takes to the stage, to the point of possession. “The beasts - explains Emma Dante - end up on a stage full of peril and temptation, a place of sin, the terrestrial world. There they find everything they need: the house, the playrooms, the path, the refuge in which to find shelter, fear, the sea, the shipwreck, the trench, the tomb before which to mourn the dead, the remains of a catastrophe... the beasts of the stage do nothing but imagine. They convince themselves they are living, holding borrowed things in their hands, feeding on sludge, muttering scraps of stories. Just like children they believe in the games and, alienated from everything, they allow themselves to be enchanted until they are led to the excesses of dementia. They dance, they sing, they shout, they argue in southern dialects, they seduce, they go crazy, they love, they laugh, they fight... After facing various tasks, yet another command echoes from the wings, the last, and the most terrible. Only now do the “imbeciles” disobey. They decide to stand before us, naked. Their discovery will be that they have always been naked and that they have never been anything else. It will no longer make sense to pick up their clothes, cover themselves, and carry out other actions; but only to simply stand there, and look”.

As the show contains scenes of full-frontal nudity, it is unsuitable for spectators under the age of 16.