Poor Piero

Dripping with irreverent humour, Poor Piero is a divertissement in two acts and a prologue by Achille Campanile: a paradoxical, hilarious comedy in which death itself becomes the occasion for liberating laughter.

When Piero, perhaps from the shock of dying, unexpectedly resurrects, the chaos becomes total. Campanile's unmistakable style (double meanings, rapid-fire exchanges and situations on the edge of absurdity) dismantles the taboos around death and funeral rituals, exposing the hypocrisy of bourgeois “good manners.”

Our staging pushes the comedy and the irreverence further, sharpening the contrast between the rigidity of social conventions and the absurdity of the situations. Characters are deliberately caricatural, stripped of common sense and authentic feeling, fully enslaved to the codes that cage them. Between clumsy obituaries, ceremonial tears and cutting one-liners, the production lingers on the parody of respectability and the hypocrisies that surround death.