Carmelo Rifici now directs a comedy and his choice has fallen on an exhilarating vaudeville by Georges Feydeau, The Flea in the Ear, which he personally adapted and translated together with Tindaro Granata.

A wife, alarmed by her husband's rather cold and distracted behaviour, suspects that he has a mistress. To test his assumed infidelity, through a friend she sends him a passionate and anonymous love letter, in which she fixes an appointment with him in a hotel that rents rooms by the hour, where the wife intends to go in person to see whether her spouse falls into the trap. What happens in that hotel is an incredible tangle of the craziest and most absurd situations: everyone runs away from but also chases each other, while at the same time desperately trying to keep up appearances, in a whirlwind of actions and contacts that become more and more complicated until the sensational final resolution of the various mysteries.

“In recent years”, writes Rifici, “my research as a director has focused on the theme of language and its ambiguities. “The Flea in the Ear”, is also in some ways a farce focusing on language, or rather a farce of languages. As with Shakespeare's great comedies, here we are faced with a representation of human relationships built on the sagacity of words but, unlike the greatest English author, Feydeau imposes a perfect comedy mechanism on the show. Like a high-precision watch, it takes its characters and their ways of speaking beyond the level of a language 'game' played for its own sake, just for pure entertainment and escapism, with the aim of extrapolating its maximum theatrical potential and maximum degree of human ridiculousness".