Theatre as Resistance: Dario Fo and Franca Rame

My first experience with anything related to the late Dario Fo was watching The Accidental Death of an Anarchist at the Wyndham’s Theatre in London in 1980.

Dario Fo (who is Italian) wrote this play in 1970, inspired by the true story of an Italian railroad worker who was being questioned at a Milan police station because the authorities suspected him of terrorism. While the worker was being interrogated, he “accidentally” fell out of an upper story window and was killed.

In the play, a fraud and trickster called The Maniac, infiltrates the police station and pretends to be a high official investigating the “accident,” much to the anxiety of those who were responsible for the death.

It was both searing and hilarious.

This play is typical of Fo’s work, exposing the inequality of the system, which exists at the expense of the working citizen, while simultaneously being extremely entertaining. Fo is a performer, a clown, who acted in most of his own plays.

Dario Fo received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1997, the only actor to have ever received the prize. The Nobel committee honored him as one “who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden.”

His longtime collaborator (and his wife) was actress Franca Rame (RAH-may), who was born into a theatre family that stretched back centuries into the 1700s.

Imagine that.

Fo was a painter, a playwright, an expert on Commedia Dell’arte, and a theatre scholar, but has always called himself an actor.

“An actor par excellence,” is actually what he quipped.

Since 1968, Fo and Rame worked against the class system in Italy, creating theatre which highlighted the plight of the worker, as well as calling out the hypocrisy of authority wherever they found it, including the Catholic Church.

A Papal spokesman called one of his broadcast plays, “the most blasphemous show in the history of television.”

Fo took that as a compliment.

Their theatre was not only affected by the times, but they hoped that the times would be affected by their theatre.

It is impossible to overstate how courageous their theatre work was.

In 1973, in reprisal for their political work, Franca Rame was kidnapped at gunpoint by Fascist thugs. While abducted, she was raped and tortured and left for dead in a park. Two months later she was back again at her theatre, performing anti-Fascist monologues.

In 1986, at the suggestion of Fo/Rame scholar Ronald Jenkins, the American Repertory Theatre invited Dario Fo to perform in the USA. This was extremely difficult, as Fo was a communist and the authorities thought that he would be subversive. He had already been denied a U.S. visa twice.

A.R.T. Artistic Director Robert Brustein said, “There was this assumption on the part of some of our legislators that anyone who had any Communist Party affiliations would somehow bring down the American government. We had to work very hard to demonstrate that Dario was an artist, first and foremost.”

As a result of Jenkins’s and Brustein’s united efforts, Fo’s visit was approved.

Jenkins says this about Dario:

“He writes his plays with his body before setting them on paper, improvising in front of an audience so that he can capture the kinetic drive of his gestures in the syntax of his dialogues. He usually performs in a mixture of Italian dialects, onomatopoeic sounds and invented words, all inspired by paintings that he makes as visual outlines of his plots. He is gripped by the actor's obsession with transformation, translating body language into verbal language, tragic contradictions into comic paradox and visual images from the world around him into the muscular truth of slapstick.”

I met Dario Fo and Franca Rame in 1996 at an ISTA in Denmark, organized by theatre director and fellow Italian Eugenio Barba.

Franca began by talking to us of theatre as a method of resistance. She said, “At all times in Italy, there was a list of plays that were not in the favor of the government - and we were always on that list.”

Franca told us the story of the Lusvardi Glass Factory, where their theatre attended worker’s meetings in 1975. The workers occupied the factory, remaining in the building over a labor dispute, to avoid being locked out. But they were not getting paid. And there was no distribution to sell what they made. Franca and Dario told the glassworkers that if they produced drinking glasses, the theatre would sell them.

She said, “The next week we performed Mistero Buffo in Milan and traveled there with truckloads of glasses. We told the audience of the situation at Lusvardi - and during the intermission we sold all 8,000 glasses. At the end of the performance, the entire audience - of thousands - raised their glasses in a show of solidarity.”

Eugenio had just planned to have Dario say a few words to us and not exert himself, because Fo had just suffered a stroke the previous year. Eugenio was extremely concerned about his friend’s health.

But Dario not only talked to us, but he insisted on performing.

He started by giving us his manifesto: “The first rule of theatre is that there are no rules.”

He demonstrated “grammelot,” which was speaking in gibberish, but speaking in such a way as to ape the sounds and rhythms of that language. He pretended to be an English barrister making a case before a jury. He spoke no English, but improvised in such a way which would sound English to a non-English Speaker.

It was hilarious. But Eugenio watched him carefully, anxiously, worried that his performing would be too much for him. Fo seemed unconcerned, and we certainly didn’t notice anything.

He performed short pieces from his solo comedy, Mistero Buffo, and demonstrated how the story was always manifested in the body.

We delighted in all of his performances, which lasted the better part of an hour.

When Dario was done, Eugenio stood up with tears in his eyes, and put his arms around his friend. He saw what Dario had done, not as a performance, but as a gesture of pure love.

Eugenio then turned to us spoke very quietly.

“Would you please stand?” Eugenio asked us.

We stood.

“This is the history of theatre which you have seen here today,” Eugenio said. “The joy, but also the struggle. The resistance! Please tell your students, your colleagues, your friends, the message that you have seen here today.”

And so I have done.

* * *