Soon, audiences will have another chance to catch Onorato and I Birbanti. I had said in an interview beforehand that I hoped someone would leave the theatre, but I didn’t really want it to be a reviewer.” “I remember at one of the first performances we did of The Last King of Porn in Edinburgh, the theatre was packed, and a critic was sat in the first row,” Onorato laughs. Kalissa Faust, I Birbanti’s experimental take on Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, ran at the 2014 Camden Fringe, and The Last King of Porn, the company’s free adaptation of the Chuck Palahniuk novel Snuff, ran at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe. The UK has already had a taste of Onorato’s explosive work. Whatever we do, though, we try to be different. Then, we started merging theatre with other artforms like art and music and video. “When we started, we wanted to do comedy in an immersive way. “I Birbanti translates as something like the rascals, or the rogues, or the bad boys,” says Onorato. In his hometown of Milan, Italian writer and director Alessandro Onorato and his company I Birbanti have something of a reputation for provocation.
