Lobster Snuff

An Argentine butcher turned playwright has fallen foul of the Italian censor for continuing William S Burroughs' declared mission in Naked Lunch, of showing the reality behind what is on the fork. The action of Rodrigo Garcia's Incident: Kill to Eat includes the stringing up of a lobster on a nylon cord and the transmission to the audience, via a microphone, of the sound of its struggles. Apparently the idea is that we should all do our own butchering: "You need plenty of imagination, and I don't have it, to feel the fear of death as you open a can of meatballs with peas in the kitchen at home." Three plain-clothes officers broke up the first night, and the audience presumably scattered like rabbits. It's to be hoped that Garcia doesn't bring his theatre piece to Britain, where it can take over seventy officers to deal with one man and his placards. A theatre audience, even an avant-garde one, might well exceed the competence of the entire Metropolitan Police.

In commenting on the crustacean-protective police raid, Milan's animal rights assessor confirmed the priorities: "There is a law here which forbids exposing audiences to animals experiencing drawn out and useless stress," he said. "I know this goes on in restaurants, but there it is not turned into a spectacle."