The author portrays himself diagonally occupying the entire scene of the picture. The figure stands out against an empty background, with no reference to time or place, and even the choice of colors is deliberately essential: the scene is vermilion, with few variations, and the dark dress is monochrome. The attitude is thoughtful, almost ascetic, intent on an intimate and profound reflection that involves the man and the artist. The expressive methods also denounce the illustrious pictorial ancestry which in this period involved the interest of the painter, in particular Schiele and Soutine.

An example of Lattes' extreme versatility in the manipulation of pictorial materials, the work represents a vegetable tangle, a labyrinth where the attention is lost in an overlapping of graphic inventions without a solution of continuity. The refined technique and imaginative capacity allow the artist to move away from practice to exploit even pure chance and thus obtain new executive methods. Black and white thus becomes capable of dilating its synthesis beyond forms and beyond figuration.

The title recalls that of Ravel's opera-ballet performed for the first time in 1925, which speaks of a child who relates to nature and the objects that surround him, first in an impatient and cruel way, and then in an aware and repented. The atmosphere of the painting well represents the nocturnal melancholy that frames the transfigured and mysterious garden in which the child's figure moves: almost by magic, the child's face emerges from the dark and dense colors of the background, but this melts into disturbing drippings that branch out on almost abstract backgrounds.

The theater is the material and transfigured place of many of Lattes' fantasies. His puppets act on this stage, but it can also be a metaphor for the place where the dramas or comedies of the great theater of memory take place. The little theater is seen from the front, inexorably empty and full of expectations. It occupies all the space of the painting eliminating the environment and therefore placing itself in an abstract dimension: it is not simply a domestic object, a living room object or a child's game, but expands its presence into an elsewhere that fascinates and disturbs at the same time.