Lorenzaccio

Florence, 1537. While the city is in the hands of his tyrannical, debauched cousin, Duke Alexander de Medici, Lorenzo murmers the plan to assassinate him. Playing a double game by becoming the duke's close friend, the better to strike him later, the young man assumes the perverse, cynical mask of Lorenzaccio, the contemptuous nickname given to him by the Florentines. In the noxious atmosphere of a city that was once the capital of artists but has become the capital of vice, against a backdrop of adultery and betrayal, one character asks: "Is corruption a law of nature?"
Lorenzaccio is not just a historical drama. Highly political, the play echoes the failure of the July 1830 revolution, and develops an issue that is still relevant today: young people's sense of emptiness in the face of politics, and the power of collective action.