Ten years to the day since it won the Premio Ubu, the tiger from Mompracem is back to roaring: the funniest and smartest company in Pisa, I Sacchi di Sabbia, brings back to town their most famous and appreciated show, Sandokan. A hilarious trip into Emilio Salgari’s fantasy, for both children and adults, in the frame of the Palazzo della Carovana.

The place where the action unfolds is a kitchen: four characters gather around a table and after wearing an apron start living the intricate deeds of the Malaysian pirate. Cornerstone of the whole action are vegetables, in every possible variant: soldier-carrots, forest-celery, blood red tomatoes, bomb-potatoes, parsley to decorate. Moreover, wooden spoons used as swords, graters as cannons, a bucket of water to represent the sea around Borneo, tubes of paper tower as telescopes, paper bags, pocketknives, mezzaluna knives… The story materialises in the mind of spectators, to literally explode in a maddening frenzy. The kitchen is Sandokan’s house, the pirates’ ship, Lord Guillonk’s villa, the Malaysian forest, the beach of Mompracem.

Faitfhul to the ideal of an ironic everyday exotism (Salgari never journeyed beyond the Adriatic Sea), the show gives new life to some simple everyday objects, and is therefore both a praise of imagination (which is at constant risk of foundering on the superficiality of our times) and a satyr of our habits. Little men (us) and their big dreams collide in a theatre game both funny and elementary. Who will prevail?