“Blimey, home at last. My feet are killing me.”
Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!
Like a lot of good satire, not only is the target of the satire savaged in this play, so too, are the ones whose opinions most closely align. When I think about say Nineteen Eighty Four, in the way that all dystopia is a kind of parody, I think about while there is a direct critique going on in the novel, what is most effective about it is that it’s also a broader critique of power. Right now, we’re in the middle of a kind of inflation crisis, there’s blame being thrown toward everyone about everything. And the way politics works, the number one goal is to always start by assessing blame and avoiding responsibility. Even taking responsibility is a way to deflect responsibility. And all of this is because of the central goal of all politics, to stay in power.
In this play, we have a similar situation. Prices are high and people are revolting. We begin with two women meeting on the stairs. One woman notices that her neighbor has absolutely bursting shopping bags, and when she confronts her friend about this the friend avers, making a joke about having a rich lover. When pressed, she tells about a revolt at the grocery store where inflated prices (which is also the result of price gouging we’re meant to understand), hit a breaking point and all the shoppers just started grabbing whatever they could. So too did the neighbor. Not that she grabbed anything she really needed — dog food, rabbit heads, and other random, but expensive items — because the passion and explosion of outrage and riots tends not to involve logic, but rage.
From there, the women’s husbands come home where one gives him a dinner of dog food and rabbit head stew with millet (bird food).
The rest of the play explores these criticisms and absurdities. In general the play is a critique of the Communist Party in Italy, but not from a Right-ist perspective, but more so as a kind of Devil’s advocate way. If the party is meant to deliver a working society, and fails, it doesn’t really benefit the citizens to be starving, if ideologically pure.
