Dario Fo was 88 when he published his first novel, The Pope’s Daughter, with Lucrezia Borgia as protagonist. As he approaches his 90th birthday next week, he is working on an adaptation of Plautus’s Menaechmi, a play that underpinned his 1979 success, Trumpets and Raspberries, a farcical treatment of the kidnapping and murder of the Christian Democrat politician, Aldo Moro.
Fo was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1997 for the theatre work that has made him one of the world’s most performed living dramatist, but his creativity was never limited to play‑writing. He now has five novels to his name, two of them co-authored, all this without abandoning his life‑long work as a performer, artist, pamphleteer and anarchic, puckish nuisance to the political establishment. His range of talents will go on display in October this year when the first UK exhibition of his artwork takes place at a Fo-Fest in Edinbugh, featuring seminars, discussions, and productions of plays inspired by him.
It will be the final irony of a varied career if the full range of his abilities as artist as well as actor-author – he originally trained at art school, not as an actor – becomes known in Britain only when he has reached an age when most writers have retired into tranquillity. Now Fo is motivated by the race against time, more strongly felt following the death in 2013 of his actor wife, Franca Rame.
Dario Fo and Franca Rame in 1962
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Dario Fo and Franca Rame in 1962. Photograph: Mondadori via Getty Images
Retirement holds no charms. His house in Milan is like a Renaissance studio: uncompleted canvases are piled against a wall and a flock of secretaries, rising artists and assorted assistants execute the work. His eyesight has been poor since he suffered a stroke, so I found him recently in one room dictating text for a book and show on Maria Callas while in an adjacent room two young artists were adding colour to paintings of the diva he had sketched out. The paintings were later exhibited in Verona and bought by a collector for display in a new gallery entirely dedicated to his work, while the performance took place in the Roman theatre.
In Italy he has gone through various phases as a playwright, from his debut in the 1950s with a series of one-act farces, compared wrongly to the absurdist farces of Ionesco and Beckett, before moving on to the so‑called “bourgeois” period when he wrote a play a year for performance in the Odeon in Milan and then in the big theatres across Italy. Far from reinforcing a bourgeois mentality, these were biting, satirical works, which used song as well as dialogue. They also sparked outrage among the censors, especially when the improvisational skills of Fo and Rame meant the approved scripts did not match the words spoken on stage.
A turning point came in 1968, the year of the student movements and anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, when Fo and Rame broke with commercial theatre to establish their own performance circuits and to perform angry but hilarious political farces of their own. They established a co-operative, and after the first failed, they started again. This was the time of Accidental Death of an Anarchist, a work that has become the international protest play, but which dealt specifically with the death in police custody of Giuseppe “Pino” Pinelli. An innocent man, Pinelli was taken in for questioning following an explosion in a Milan bank that would kill 16 people, and “fell” to his death from a fourth-floor window.
Only a playwright with a clown’s sense of the tragic and the absurd could have turned the death of Pinelli into a piece of knockabout theatre. The play is madcap on the surface but grippingly serious underneath. Fo played the principal part – not even his strongest critics deny his genius as performer.
Dario Fo painting the stage set for Lu Santo Jullàre Françesco, at the Spoleto festival
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Dario Fo painting the stage set for Lu Santo Jullàre Françesco, at the Spoleto festival in 1999. Photograph: HO/EPA
Many of his best-known plays take their subjects from topics featured in the day’s headlines, but the paradox is that while Fo is a revolutionary in politics, he is conservative in theatre. He is deeply rooted in tradition and has a profound knowledge of classical theatre. He has no truck with the avant garde, nor with theatre produced in little garrets. Combining laughter with indignation, his riotous but satirical farce embodies the longer, richer tradition of popular theatre.
The relationship, personal and professional, between Fo and Rame is unique in the history of stage performance. She had theatre in her blood, in a way that he did not. She belonged to a family company of touring players whose stock in trade was improvisation, a style that dates back to the commedia dell’arte in Italy. Together, they also developed a new style of theatre that explored feminist issues.
Rame was certainly the only critic Fo trusted, and it was she who gave the final form to the scripts after they had undergone radical changes during a run. Was her contribution greater in the feminist monologues such as All House, Bed and Church, which have become such favourites? She said he was the writer in the family and that he had written the feminist pieces at her bidding, but he stated in his funeral oration that he had underplayed her contribution.
Fo is driven to carry on acting. Great actors, such as Molière, he says, die on stage. He reacts with incredulity to the idea that Shakespeare simply retired to Stratford-upon-Avon – “there must have been more to it,” he mutters. In addition to his stage commitments, Fo also devotes time to other causes, producing pamphlets on climate change as well as articles and speeches in support of the maverick Five Star anti‑party movement set up by the comedian-politico Beppe Grillo, whose mocking, contrarian utopianism mirrors Fo’s outlook.
Fo is convinced he is now doing his most important work. He likens himself in this regard to Picasso, to whom he has dedicated one of a recent series of monographs of great artists, illustrated novels that he then transforms into performance pieces. The most recent of these, Gypsy by Race, is about Johann Trollmann, a German boxer who became light-heavyweight champion in the 1930s, and died during the second world war in a concentration camp.
Fo’s appearances on Rai TV, Italy’s national public broadcaster from which he was barred during his most militant period, are not now limited to discussions. He has presented a series of programmes on artists, mainly the great Renaissance masters, which show how Caravaggio, Mantegna and others were dissidents at the courts of their princely patrons; they showed the same ironic disdain for the powerful that Fo himself has always displayed.
• Joseph Farrell is the author of Dario Fo: Stage, Text and Tradition.
