16 Oct-4 Nov. By Ibsen, with Massimo Populizio, directed by Piero Maccarinelli. The critic, Jan Kott, rated this play Ibsen's greatest, and compared it to Shakespeare's King Lear  for the emotional extremities to which it drives its larger-than-life characters. 

Set in winter, in the north, where the vital passions of the characters are locked in a lethal coldness of the soul, it dramatizes a world of the living dead, that of the Borkman family, in which vital human impulses have been so long repressed, that the elder trio in the play, attempts to entrap the younger generation into carrying on its spiritually deadly heritage. But the young Erhart Borkman is rescued by love, sexual passion and emotional liberation.

As George Bernard Shaw wrote of the play: "This melancholy household of the dead crumbles to dust at the knock of the younger generation at the door.... The fresh air and the light break into the tomb; and its inhabitants crumble it