ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an overview of K and Traumdeutung, the first two plays written by Edoardo Sanguineti, as they relate to the cultural climate of the early 1960s, when both the Italian neoavanguardia and new European theatre played a substantial role in his early works. It focuses on Storie naturali and discusses the textual elements that make it exemplary of Sanguineti's dramaturgic writing. Sanguineti will certainly be remembered for the consistency of both his ideas and linguistic experimentation. In Antonin Artaud the site of difference was represented by his notion of 'theatre of cruelty', which was conceived of as a virtual space where words and gestures would be performed only once. Sanguineti, adopting Artaud's idea of a 'theatre of cruelty', identifies literature as a space of radical experimentation. The chapter discusses the relationship between Sanguineti's early theatre and the principles of the neoavanguardia.
