By Bertolt Brecht, directed by Claudio Longhi, with Umberto Orsini, Nicola Bortolotti, Simone Francia. Original music by Hans-Dieter Hosalla. Originally written by Brecht in 1941 when he was in exile in Helsinki awaiting a visa to enter the US, The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui was not produced on stage until 1958.

The play chronicles the rise of Arturo Ui, a fictional 1930s Chicago mobster and his attempts to control the cauliflower racket by ruthlessly disposing of the opposition. The partly comic parable about the rise of Adolf Hitler in 1930s Germany is a hodge-podge of gangster clichés, but it contains echoes of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Richard III, as well as The Godfather, Scarface and The Sopranos. The serious point that it makes is that a buffoon can become a mass murderer. In Italian. Teatro Argentina, Largo di Torre Argentina 52, tel. 06684000311, www.teatrodiroma.net.