Dario Fo Biography and List of Works

Prolific Italian playwright, actor- manager-director, known for his satirical plays. Fo was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997. In his works Fo has combined oral expression from the popular performance tradition with radical thought. He has used laughter as a weapon against the conservative establishment of Italy's political scene, and the social and international evils of the Cold War era.

"Our task as intellectuals, as persons who mount the pulpit or the stage, and who, most importantly, address to young people, our task is not just to teach them method, like how to use the arms, how to control breathing, how to use the stomach, the voice, the falsetto, the contracampo. It's not enough to teach a technique or a style: we have to show them what is happening around us. They have to be able to tell their own story. A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance."
(from Nobel Lecture, 1997)

Dario Fo was born in San Giano, a small town near the northern Italian city of Milan. His father was a railroad worker and was also a part-time actor. His mother came from a peasant background. During World War II Fo helped his father, who was a member of the resistance against German forces in Italy and took escaped Allied soldiers across the border to Switzerland.

Fo studied at an art school and planned to become an architect. Fo´s career as a dramatist and actor started in small cabarets, theatres. Later he worked at the Italian national radio and television networks. Most of Fo's early works were one-act farces. He first attracted the attention of the critics with Il dito nell' occhio (1953), a loosely structured harlequinade in which he combined the Marxist philosophy with gags, songs, and other theatrical devices reminiscent of the commedia dell'arte, popular stage shows, and 19th-century farce. Fo then spent a brief time as a film actor and set designer before returning to writing for the theatre.

In 1959 Fo founded with his wife, the actor Franca Rame, the Compagnia Dario Fo-Franca Rame, which produced number of popular satirical dramas, including Archangels Don't Play Pinball and He Had Two Pistols with White and Black Eyes. In these plays Fo adopted the view that art is an instrument of social and political change. The most original work form the 1960s, Mistero buffo (1969), consists of a number of monologues taken from medieval religious works and contemporary chronicles. The parts are linked by commentaries about topical issues or special targets to create associations between past and present. The Italian government has censored his works, and during his career Fo has been jailed, beaten up, and threatened with assassination.

Ahiiii. Beat yourselves. Beat your selves. Ahiiiiah!
And you rulers, you usurers,
You will suffer misfortune,
For you have spat in the face of Christ,
Enriching yourselves with ill-gotten gains. Beat yourselves!
You who have squeezed, as a person would crush grapes,
The money out of those who sweat and toil.
Ahiiii. Beat yourselves. Beat yourselves. Ahiiiiah!
(from Mistero Buffo)

By performing comic sketches in television, the pair became famous among Italian public. He presented a satirical television show in 1962, which was closed down after just seven weeks on air. In 1968 Dario Fo and Franca Rame founded the acting group Nuova Scena, which had ties to the Italian Communist Party. However, his satirical views aroused much critic from the Communist Press like earlier from the Catholic Church. Fo distanced himself from Communist politics, attacking openly the Party's bureaucracy and ideological failures.

In 1970 Fo started their third major theatre group, Colletivo Teatrale La Comune. He performed in hurriedly constructed and staged plays, which were produced in response to specific international, national, or local issues, and used much improvisation and revisions. Among these were Guerra di popolo in Cile (1973), about the popular revolt in Chile, and Fedayn (1971), about the Palestinian question. The Open Couple (1983) looked at the place of women in society and Zitti! Stiamo Precipitanto (1990) was about AIDS.

Among Dario Fo´s most famous works is Accidental Death of an Anarchist, about the police murder of a political activist. "MANIAC: So? Who cares? the important thing is to have a good scandal... Nolimus aut velimus! So that the Italian nation can march alongside the Americans and the English, and become a modern and social-democratic society, so that finally we can say: 'It's true - we're in the shit right up to our necks, and that's precisely the reason why we walk with our heads held high!'" We Can't Pay? We Won't Pay! Was about citizens refusing to pay taxes to a corrupt government, and Mistero Buffo (Comic Mystery), which is based on popular religious works of the Middle Ages but is played with topical themes and changed with each audience. Fo´s theatrical pieces often depend upon improvisation and employ current events. From the 1970s Fo has worked mainly at the Palazzina Liberty in Milano.

In his book Manuale Minimo dell'Attore (1987) Fo has explored the history jesters, minstrels, and political clowns, whom he believes have changed the course of history. The book was recorded from talks, workshops, lectures and conference pieces and then edited by Franca Rame.

"In my view, what we have around us is a dead theatre for dead people. Supply alternates with demand, and every culture has the theatre it deserves. In Italy, no one if more dead than the authors, incapable producing anything other than literary texts, with grand speeches full of elaborately patterned phrases chasing and devouring each other."
(from The Tricks of the Trade by Dario Fo, 1987)

For further reading: File on Fo by T. Mitchell (1989); Dario Fo and Franca Rame by D. Hirst (1989); The Commedia Dell'Arte from the Renaissance to Dario Fo, ed. by Christopher Cairns (1989), Dario Fo and Popular Performance by Antonio Scuderi (1998); Dario Fo: Revolutionary Theatre by Tom Behan (1999); Dario Fo: Stage, Text, and Tradition, ed. by Joseph Farrell, Antonio Scuderi (2000); Dario Fo's Use of Art for the Stage by Christopher Cairns (2000)

Non tutti i ladri vengono per nuocere, (1950)