1997 Aged 71 when he received the honour and still going strong, Dario Fo, the Italian dramatist, screenwriter, composer, librettist, theatre manager, television game show author and political activist, has used his art and wit to ridicule political corruption, the Catholic Church, fascism, the Communist party, the Mafia, Israel, Lyndon B. Johnson and the US in general, the Carabinieri (Italian state police) – and many other persons and institutions not at all good at taking jokes. The wonder is not that he got the Nobel Prize, but that he lived long enough to take delivery of it.
Against the limits of frequent censorship and worse, Fo’s greatest achievement in strictly literary terms has been to make theatre popular. While in most other countries it’s a small segment of the middle classes who patronise the live theatre (where they can find it), Fo and his wife Franca Rame have brought theatre to the people – touring the country first with the company bearing their names, then with the Associazione Nuova Scena with its portable stages, and finally their Collettivo Teatrale La Commune.
Among their most popular productions were Mistero Buffo (Slapstick Mystery) (1969), seen by up to three million Italians, in which Fo drew on the tradition of medieval travelling performances often held in town squares, and Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970), his most often performed work outside Italy – staged in over 40 countries.
Based on a real-life case in which an anarchist, suspected of having bombed a bank in Milan, mysteriously fell or was thrown from a fourth-floor window in a police station (at first the police said he jumped in remorse for his part in the atrocity), the play draws on the popular tradition of the commedia dell’arte, posing a Harlequin-like trickster, ‘the Maniac’, to infiltrate the judicial system and get the police to deconstruct the official account in their own words.
Dario Fo ‘emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages’, his Nobel citation read, ‘in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden’. On receiving his award, Fo paid tribute to Ruzzante Beolco – ‘the true father of the commedia dell’arte’, he called him – who, along with Molière, ‘was despised for bringing onto the stage the everyday life, joys and desperation of the common people; the hypocrisy and the arrogance of the high and mighty; and the incessant injustice. And their major, unforgivable fault was this: in telling these things, they made people laugh. Laughter does not please the mighty.’