In a remote country house, the newly-appointed governess arrives to take charge of the orphaned Flora and Miles. She must fight to protect them from strange and menacing spirits. But are these apparitions real, or the product of her troubled imagination? And what terrible evil occurred before her arrival?

This double bill from I Teatri Reggio Emila sets theatrical farce in private spaces. Alfred, Alfred, comes from the experience in hospital of its composer, Franco Donatoni, in 1992: a journey suspended between the surreal intimate visions of a patient and the reality of hospital life. Written three centuries earlier, Pergolesi’s La serva padrona offers a picture of domestic antics, where a shrewd maid outwits her grumpy master into marrying her.