Dario Fo

Dario Fo: The Jester Who Scourged Authority

A Cardinal Vicar of Rome called his best-known show "the most blasphemous show in the history of television." The Italian state broadcaster banned him for fourteen years and destroyed the tapes. The United States twice refused him a visa, on one occasion accusing him of belonging to organisations that supported terrorists, at a moment when he was the foreign playwright most produced in American theatres. In 1997 the Swedish Academy gave him the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dario Fo spent his life proving that laughter is a political instrument, and everybody involved understood it.

The Fabulatori of Lake Maggiore

Dario Luigi Angelo Fo was born on 24 March 1926 in Sangiano, in Lombardy near Lake Maggiore, the eldest of three children. His father Felice was a railway stationmaster and a socialist amateur actor; his mother, Pina Rota, came from peasant stock. The family moved constantly along the Swiss border, and the boy absorbed a living oral tradition from his maternal grandfather, from Lombard fishermen and from glassblowers — the *fabulatori*, storytellers who improvised, exaggerated and worked a crowd. It is the single most important fact about his art: everything he later did in a theatre was a sophisticated version of something he had first heard on a lakeside.

His war is contested. Conscripted at sixteen into Mussolini's Repubblica Sociale Italiana, Fo said he had secretly helped his father smuggle refugees and Allied soldiers into Switzerland. Testimony from both partisans and former fascist comrades disputed this, and a Varese court ruling in 1979 suggested he had taken part in genuine fascist operations. The account remains unresolved.

After 1945 he studied at the Brera Academy and read architecture at the Politecnico di Milano, starting a thesis on Roman building. Disillusioned by postwar architectural practice, he suffered a nervous breakdown; a doctor advised him to do the things that gave him pleasure. He went to art and improvised theatre and never came back.

Franca Rame

He met the actress Franca Rame while both were working in the revue *Sette giorni a Milano*. They married on 24 June 1954 and their son Jacopo was born the following March. The partnership that followed was total: Fo wrote, directed, and designed sets and costumes; Rame ran the company, performed, and increasingly wrote her own material, particularly the monologues on women's lives that the Swedish Academy would later single out. To treat Fo's body of work as the product of one author is to misdescribe it.

Banned by the State Broadcaster

In 1951 RAI commissioned a solo radio series, *Poer nano*, eighteen adult fairy-tale monologues that irreverently reworked biblical and Shakespearean material. The authorities were scandalised and cancelled it; Fo simply performed it live at Milan's Teatro Odeon in 1952. In 1953 he co-created the revue *Il dito nell'occhio* — "A Finger in the Eye" — with Franco Parenti and Giustino Durano, a twenty-one-sketch show that ran 113 performances at the Piccolo Teatro and then toured.

A spell in Rome writing for cinema followed, including Carlo Lizzani's *Lo svitato* (1956), a film indebted to Tati, Keaton and Chaplin. Fo said the apprenticeship taught him "sequences, fast pace, sharp dialogue, and getting rid of conventions of space and time" — a description of his own mature stagecraft.

The Compagnia Fo-Rame formed in 1958 and turned out six full-length plays a year. *Gli arcangeli non giocano al flipper* (*Archangels Don't Play Pinball*, 1959) became his first work staged abroad. Then, in 1962, RAI hired him to write and direct the variety show *Canzonissima*. One sketch showed an aunt falling into a meat-processing machine; industrialists complained. When RAI refused to broadcast an episode about unsafe building sites for fear of inflaming the unions, Fo and Rame walked out on 29 November 1962. RAI sued them, destroyed the recordings, and kept them off Italian television for fourteen years. Parliament debated it.

Nuova Scena and La Comune

After May 1968 Fo and Rame abandoned the subsidised theatre altogether and founded Associazione Nuova Scena, playing workers' clubs. Fo was never a member of the Italian Communist Party, and his willingness to satirise it from the stage made the alliance short-lived. In 1970 he, Rame, Paolo Ciarchi and Nanni Ricordi set up the Collettivo Teatrale La Comune, converting a derelict workshop in the working-class Porta Vittoria district of Milan into a community centre with a library, a theatre and audiovisual facilities.

*Mistero Buffo*, first performed in 1969, was the purest expression of the *fabulatori* inheritance: solo storytelling drawn from medieval religious drama and turned against clerical power. He played it across Europe, Asia, Canada and Latin America for thirty years, and it has been called one of the most controversial and popular spectacles in postwar European theatre. Cardinal Ugo Poletti's verdict on it was the blasphemy line.

Accidental Death of an Anarchist

In December 1969 a bomb at the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura in Milan's Piazza Fontana killed sixteen people. The anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli, taken into police custody, fell to his death from a fourth-floor window. A year later Fo opened *Morte accidentale di un anarchico*, in which a compulsive impersonator infiltrates a police station and forces the officers to re-enact their own contradictory accounts. Fo described it as "a grotesque farce about a tragic farce." It became the most performed Italian play of the century.

*Non si paga! Non si paga!* (*Can't Pay? Won't Pay!*, 1974) dramatised the *autoriduzione* movement, in which Italians took goods from supermarkets and paid what they thought fair. By 1990 it had been staged in thirty-five countries, and its English title had entered the language.

The Cost

The retaliation was not metaphorical. In March 1973, five fascists — allegedly commissioned by Milanese Carabinieri officers — abducted Franca Rame at gunpoint, raped, beat, burned and cut her, and left her in a park. The couple kept touring. That September *Guerra di popolo in Cile*, written after Allende's death, played to audiences so charged that in Turin one spectator ate ten pages of a document he feared held names. In November police arrested Fo in Sassari, in breach of an Italian law forbidding police to enter theatres during performances; the outrage sold more tickets.

In 1980 the United States barred them from the Festival of Italian Theatre; "An Evening Without Dario Fo and Franca Rame" was staged in New York with Arthur Miller, Bernard Malamud, Richard Foreman and Martin Scorsese in attendance. A second refusal came in 1983. Fo's summary was pure Fo: "We are Italian citizens supposed to have committed the crime of aiding terrorists. Italian judicial authorities never charged us... Now Americans decide we support terrorists — either Italian authorities aren't doing their job or are complicit with us."

Why Dario Is Called a Genius

The Swedish Academy's citation names the quality exactly: a writer "who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden." That is not a courtesy formula. Fo's genuine originality was archaeological and formal at once — he went back past the entire bourgeois tradition of the well-made play to the medieval *giullare* and the *commedia dell'arte*, recovered a performance grammar of improvisation, mime, direct address and physical comedy that Italian high culture had discarded, and used it to prosecute contemporary crimes. The technical achievement is that the plays are genuinely, structurally funny — farce built with the engineering precision the form requires — while being about a man thrown from a police station window. Almost nobody can hold those two things in one machine.

He was also a total man of the theatre in a way that has nearly vanished: writer, director, designer, mime and performer, capable of holding an audience alone for two hours. That is craft, not intellect, and Fo said so himself.

The counter-case deserves stating. His plays are occasional and topical by design; read on the page, stripped of his body and timing, many are thinner than the great modern dramatic literature, and the 1997 award provoked genuine objection from critics who thought a Nobel in Literature should go to a body of writing rather than a performance tradition. He was polemical rather than exploratory, and later in life he lent his authority to positions — questioning the official account of 11 September among them — that undercut his standing as a serious analyst. And the war record he described is contradicted by court testimony. Fo would have relished being the argument rather than the settled verdict. He had already called the prize "a real comedy" in 1975, adding that receiving it "would be like acting in one of my plays."

Legacy

Fo kept working past a stroke in 1995, writing *Leonardo: The Flight, the Count and the Amours* the following summer. *Il Papa e la strega* (1989) became the most-seen Italian play of its season. In the Berlusconi years he was sued by a Forza Italia senator over a play — "I have been doing satire for 40 years. It is paradox. It is grotesque" — ran for mayor of Milan under the slogan "I am not a moderate," and took 23.4 per cent in the centre-left primary of January 2006. He painted seriously to the end; his 2016 Brera exhibition honoured Johann "Rukeli" Trollmann, a Sinti boxer murdered by the Nazis. He died in Milan on 13 October 2016, aged ninety. The theatre he rescued from the Middle Ages is still, wherever authority behaves badly, being used exactly as he intended.

Achievements

• Notable work: Archangels Don't Play Pinball
• Notable work: Mistero Buffo
• Notable work: Accidental Death of an Anarchist
• Notable work: Can't Pay? Won't Pay!
• Worked as theatre director, stage actor and screenwriter