Marco Plini directs Come trattenere il respiro by English playwright Zinnie Harris, a sort of female revival of Faust in which the protagonist navigates the contradictions of our way of life in a dark fairy tale with fiercely comical undertones.

The story is about a woman, Dana, who one evening makes love to a stranger. A strange, disturbing man who claims to be the devil. From that moment on, her life changes. She finds herself facing, together with her sister Jasmine, a catastrophic adventure: a hallucinatory journey from the heart of Europe to Alexandria in Egypt. Accompanied by a strange and caring librarian who offers them manuals for every eventuality, the two women travel through a world that is falling apart, collapsing in on itself, in a systematic reversal of every rule and every certainty.
"What attracts and amazes me about this text,‘ says Plini, ’is the blind and slightly demented optimism of the protagonist who, faced with the collapse of the European financial system and the dissolution of her lifestyle, does not give up and, with the arrogance typical of contemporary Western human beings, persists in imagining and waiting for a future in which everything will return to normal, in which everything will be as it was. […] Zinnie Harris' material unequivocally absorbs the failure of late 20th-century liberalist policies, ironically commenting on what Mark Fischer called “capitalist realism”.