Dario Fo (1926-2016) and Franca Rame (1929-2013)

(নাট্যমেব পত্রিকার দ্বিতীয় সংখ্যায় প্রকাশিত)

Professor Ralph Yarrow

East Anglia University, England

For and his wife Rame are best known for satirical plays” such as Accidental Death of an Anarchist, Mistero Buffo, Can’t Pay Won’t Pay; a mixture of spectacle, mime and social comment, characterised by Fo as farce - highly acerbic, scurrilous and politicised, not mere entertainment.

But outside Italy, we only know a relatively small fraction of their work, in spite of translations and productions of their plays. Fo is one of Europe’s most popular dramatists, with consistently more productions in more languages than anyone else over many decades: he wrote more than 80 plays. In Italy, both Fo and Rame were celebrated as performers of their own works rather than as writers. For instance, they performed at more than 80 workers’ clubs and similar informal venues to over 200,000 people in one year. The debates which followed their shows often continued till late at night, involving discussion about ongoing political scenarios.

The plays in translation do not have the political bite that they do in Italy. English versions, divorced from their original context, often seem cleverly satirical - but sometimes merely whimsical. There are, of course, parallels between political injustice or governmental corruption in Italy and many other places, but translations do not always render specifics and may distort the sense by virtue of different cultural assumptions.

The ‘play’, for Fo and Rame, is not finished when its author stops typing; in fact, it has only just begun its process of being wrought. It will be rehearsed and will change and develop throughout that period, as with traditional plays; but then the next, perhaps most important, phase begins. The play is offered to an audience and will continue to change and develop in response to that audience’s reactions during and after the performances. Fo said: ‘Mistero buffo always relied on improvisation, since the audience is involved in it and doesn’t play a passive part, since it imposes its rhythms, and provokes off-the-cuff lines. This type of theatre is recreated from performance to performance, and is always different, and never repetitive.’ (Material in the above paragraphs is drawn from Anthony Frost and Ralph Yarrow, Improvisation in Drama, Theatre and Performance; Palgrave2015.)

Franca Rame and Dario Fo worked within a tradition of improvisation, which means that the texts of their plays are difficult to ‘fix’; they change according to the changing political situation and the audiences. ‘They are like living organisms, but within them there is a hard skeletal framework of radical criticism of society and of relationships within it’ (Hood 1981: vi).

Fo, says Rame, is thus ‘a maker (of scripts) rather than a writer’. He is also keenly aware of construction in all its dimensions ‘because his theatre is not based on characters, but on situations’ (Rame, Introduction to Can’t Pay Won’t Pay).

Fo and Rame conceive of theatre as direct intervention in, rather than detached comment on, political life. That abrasive, urgent struggle often brought them into conflict with leading figures at different points on the Italian political spectrum. Sexual politics are central to Rame’s self-expression, too. She was at the forefront of the women’s movement in Italy, and her monologues (e.g. A Woman Alone) are performed by actresses across Europe and America. Dario Fo, the politicised clown, inheritor of the traditions of the giullari(clown, joker, strolling player) and the comicidelVarte(popular version of the comic template which is more widely known in its more sophisticated form of commedia delVarte), constructs an improvisational style of performance and audience relationship which draws on these comic and subversive modes. His work was given a further impetus by Fo’s encounter with Jacques Lecoq, perhaps the best-known European actor-trainer of the last half of the 20th century, who specialised in physical theatre, expressive mime and the principles of original collaborative devising.

The 1950s in Italy saw tight censorship imposed by a right-wing Christian Democrat government. Fo wanted attack the myths which ‘Fascism had imposed and Christian Democracy had preserved’. Performances were spied on by government agents and sometimes banned. Fo was threatened with imprisonment in 1967 for lines deemed offensive to US President Lyndon Johnson; Rame was kidnapped and raped by a Fascist gang in 1973. ‘Authority’, writes Rame, ‘does not forgive those who do not respect the rules of its game.’

The Fo’s left mainstream theatre to establish their own collectives, ‘Nuova Scena’ and ‘La Comune’, which ‘sought a new public in working-class estates, in co-operatives and trade union halls, in factories and workers’ clubs.’ They split with the Communist Party, which operated an inflexible Party line and wanted to limit discussion, and showed ‘a certain mistrust of the workers’ intelligence and ability... to invent a particular cultural world of their own’. For Rame, ‘culture does not only mean being able to read and write, but also to express one’s own creativity on the basis of one’s world-view.’

Mistero Buffo is based on material drawn from the Middle Ages, enabling Fo ‘to look at the present with the instruments of history and culture in order to judge it better’. It uses an invented language described as ‘an imaginary Esperanto of the poor and disinherited’. It inherits its form from the medieval jongleurs, who were itinerant performers producing ‘grotesque attacks on the powerful’. Fo considers that ‘for the people, the theatre has always been the chief medium of expression, of communication, but also of provocation and agitation through ideas. The theatre is the spoken newspaper of the people in dramatic form.’ Their work and their creative process aimed to expose the ‘deleterious ideology... [of] individualism, [and] the struggle for personal power.’ (The above three paragraphs are based on Stuart Hood’s ‘Introduction’ to Mistero Buffo.)

Other well-known plays address major political and social issues of the time, often including frequent updates and audience debates. Accidental Death of an Anarchist deals with cover-ups and brutality by police, Can’t Pay Won’t Pay targets the capitalist economics of the ruling party which impacts the poor. Authority figures (police, politicians, the Pope etc.) are frequently ridiculed and revealed as corrupt and manipulative.

Working in conjunction with their audiences, Fo and Rame refuted the charge of being ‘populists’. Rame cites Brecht, who says: ‘The people can say deep and complex things with great simplicity; the populists who descend from above to write for the people say with great simplicity hollow and banal things.’ Fo and Rame were ‘simple and direct1 in their approach and the clarity of their understanding. They used a wide range of theatricality (mime, mask, clown, multi-rolling, song, repartee, witty and acerbic text etc.) to outrun censorship and the oppressive hand of authority. Their theatre is a theatre of and with the people, cognisant of its function as a strategy of resistance and committed to its celebration of the intelligence of its working-class audience.