Dario Fo

Playwright

• Born: March 24, 1926
• Birthplace: San Giano, Italy

Italian playwright

Biography

An internationally acclaimed and widely produced political playwright, Dario Fo was born in the small town of San Giano on the shore of Lake Maggiore, Lombardy, in 1926. An outspoken but not doctrinaire Marxist, Fo has often created his dramatic works on the spur of the moment, to be used in specific political situations.

Fo’s father was a railway worker and ardent antifascist. Fo was reared in a rural environment where he learned to appreciate both the traditional peasant culture of his mother and the political fight against fascism. Much of Fo’s childhood was spent listening to the traditional storytellers who could still be found in the remote areas of Lombardy. By the time he was in his teens, he had internalized a vast repertoire of traditional folk narratives. Following a brief time in the army, Fo studied architecture in Milan. Strongly attracted to the theater, however, he dropped out to become first a scene designer and then a performer.

Fo started writing plays at the age of eighteen, yet it was not until 1950 that his professional career began. He had performed for friends and fellow students with success and approached the then famous actor Franco Parenti, hoping to be invited to participate in a stage show Parenti was organizing. Parenti accepted, and a collaboration began that lasted four years. The Italian state radio invited him to do his own comical one-man show, Poer nano (Poor dwarf), and in 1952 Fo and his “poor dwarf” took to the stage. Soon after, Fo, Parenti, and the actor Giustino Durano produced the famous revue Il dito nell’ occhio (A finger in the eye). Fo, arguably the most gifted actor-clown of his day, has throughout his career worked as an all-around theater man, writing plays and songs, directing, creating sets, and acting.

After a brief interlude in Rome, where he worked as a screenwriter, there followed years when Dario Fo wrote and starred with his wife, actor Franca Rame, who came from a popular theatrical touring family. Together, they embarked on a series of successful farces. Although they all included some social satire, these works are now known as his “bourgeois” comedies. The first was Ladri, manichini, e donne nude (Thieves, dummies, and naked women), and six more followed in rapid succession. Then came the political turmoil of 1968, and Fo decided that the time had come for him to change from “the jester for the bourgeoisie” to “the jester for the proletariat.” When he decided to become the people’s court jester, Fo left the established theater behind and began a theatrical odyssey, touring Italy and, eventually, the rest of Europe.

Since the ingenious “clown-show” La signora è da buttare (Throw the lady out), Fo’s plays have had a raw, uncompromising edge. The “lady” to be thrown out is American capitalism and imperialism. The play was produced when the Vietnam War was at its height, and Fo’s criticism of the United States is stinging. In the late 1960s, Fo began working on what many consider his best play, the original and hysterically funny monologue Mistero buffo (1973; Comic mystery). With this work, he returns to his roots and takes his theater back to the people who created it. He builds the play around a series of medieval texts performed by the so-called giullari, wandering minstrels and comics who performed for the poor, satirizing the overlords and those in power. Fo dug the texts out of old documents and used them to demonstrate the historical and necessary opposition between poor and rich, between those inside and those outside the power structure. The medieval texts are juxtaposed with new texts, featuring conflicts between modern-day workers and bosses.

Fo and Rame have been in and out of favor in their native Italy. When the Left has been in political favor, they have been given positive media attention, but when the Christian Democrats reign the couple is criticized. Outside Italy, however, their fame has grown. Fo has performed his Mistero buffo all over the world between 1969 and 1999, though it did not make much headway in the United States. In 1970, Fo and Rame founded another theater dedicated to political issues of the time. An important and later internationally known play presented there was Accidental Death of an Anarchist, which satirizes police injustice. His international reputation was solidified by his being awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Dario Fo’s plays, which are haphazardly thrown together for special occasions, are often so well constructed and powerful that they withstand the test of time. Perhaps the reason for Fo’s success is to be found in his background, in his early immersion in folklore. Indeed, he has contributed to the creation of a modern folklore with a certain universality and durability that many “literary” works lack.

Fo’s work in the twenty-first century includes the play L’Anomalo Bicefalo (2003; The two-headed anomaly); his first novel, La figlia del Papa (2014; The Pope’s Daughter, 2015); and a second novel, C’è un re pazzo in Danimarca (2015; There’s a mad king in Denmark). Fo was sued for defamation by Marcello Dell’Utri, a member of then prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party over L’Anomalo Bicefalo, a satirical play in which Berlusconi is given a partial brain transplant from Vladimir Putin, who was president of Russia at the time. As of 2016, twelve of Fo’s ninety plays have been translated into English. In March 2016 the Poet’s Theatre presented Mistero Buffo, translated by Bob Scanlan and Walter Valeri, at Suffolk University’s Modern Theatre in Boston, Massachusetts.

Bibliography

Arie, Sophie. “Dario Fo Sued for €1m over Play Lampooning PM.” Guardian. Guardian News & Media, 14 Jan. 2004. Web. 29 Mar. 2016.

Behan, Tom. Dario Fo: Revolutionary Theatre. Sterling: Pluto, 2000. Print.

Byrne, Terry. “Serious and Silly: The Gospel According to Dario Fo.” Boston Globe. Boston Globe Media Partners, 17 Mar. 2016. Web. 29 Mar. 2016.

Cairns, Christopher, ed. The Commedia dell’arte from the Renaissance to Dario Fo. Lewiston: Mellen, 1989. Print.

Farrell, Joseph. Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Harlequins of the Revolution. London: Methuen, 2001. Print.

Farrell, Joseph, and Antonio Scuderi, eds. Dario Fo: Stage, Text, and Tradition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2000. Print.

Jenkins, Ronald Scott. Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Artful Laughter. New York: Aperture, 2001. Print.

Kushner, Tony. “Fo’s Last Laugh—I.” Nation 3 Nov. 1997: 4–5. Print.

Mitchell, Tony. Dario Fo: People’s Court Jester. 2d rev. and extended ed. New York: Methuen, 2014. Digital file

Rowland, Ingrid. “‘The Pope’s Daughter,’ by Dario Fo.” New York Times Sunday Book Review. New York Times, 14 Aug. 2015. Web. 29 Mar. 2016.