An adaptation in thirty scenes of the historical novel by Antonio Scurati, M, the theatrical piece has a circular structure, opening with the final line of the book and returning to that same fateful phrase spoken in parliament by Mussolini at the moment of assuming power:  If Fascism has been a criminal association... the responsibility is mine.
Without offering a concentration of historical facts, the theatrical piece seeks to stage a plastic and expressionist representation of the rise of Fascism.
“It is a play of words - explains Massimo Popolizio - a relay between eighteen actors who, freed of all rhetoric, bring to the attention of the audience the relentless rhythm of a rise to power that took place in a moment of profound weakness among institutions and political parties”.
It is a story that can never be too well-understood, in particular the six-year period that followed the Great War, with the Fiume Enterprise, the country’s faltering steps towards the socialist revolution, the reaction and spread of Squadrismo, the daring March on Rome (for which October 2022 marks the centenary) and the relentless efficiency of a political doctrine that used violence to avoid the constraints of justice.
The leading figures are the founder of Fascism and his deputies, who we hear expressed in third and first person; Marinetti, D’Annunzio, Margherita Sarfatti, the antagonists Nicola Bombacci, Pietro Nenni and Giacomo Matteotti (also examined through the moving epistolary relationship with his wife Velia), Italo Balbo, the disbanded soldiers of the Great War and an entire mass of individuals who rose the ranks. The central figure is the entire national community, the “opaque country”, almost as though Fascism were not “the carrier of this spreading virus but rather the virus itself”.