Bezahlt wird nicht - A Comedy by Dario Fo and Franca Rame

Everything is getting more expensive - not just at the petrol station, but at the discount supermarket too. Fed up with soaring food prices, Antonia and her friend Margherita impulsively raid a supermarket. Back home, they hide their haul from their unsuspecting but law-abiding husbands - only for Antonia to realise, in the heat of the shopping frenzy, that her bags contain not just everyday essentials but also dog and cat food, bird millet, and frozen rabbit heads.

The whole stash ends up under the bed or beneath Margherita's coat, leaving Antonia's husband Giovanni baffled at how quickly his wife's friend could have become so heavily pregnant. Then the police show up, the situation spirals, and a breathless comedy of errors takes hold.

Dario Fo and Franca Rame's farce from the 1970s - a blend of political fantasy and slapstick in the tradition of Italian popular theatre - revolves around runaway inflation, economic crises, and politicians' lies. That it fits our own times with uncanny precision is no surprise: laughing, we recognise how crises keep repeating themselves and how anger grows towards those who have always profited from them.