Avant-garde theatre is under attack in Italy for pushing the boat out too far after police raided a Milan playhouse to save a lobster from being bludgeoned to death and eaten on stage.

Following complaints from animal rights groups, the first-night performance of Incident: Kill to Eat by Argentinian playwright Rodrigo García was broken up by three plainclothes officers who spared the lobster from an all-too-real death scene.

A full house was expecting to see García's examination of death and meat eating, during which an unlucky crustacean is suspended from a nylon cord and a microphone picks up the sounds of its squirming. In his programme notes, García, a former butcher, denounced the dishonesty of not killing what you eat. "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," he wrote.

That did not wash with Milan's assessor for animal rights, Gianluca Comazzi, who backed the police raid.

"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."

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