Joseph Farrell: Understanding the many faces of Dario Fo

He wrote an autobiographical work, My First Seven Years, a title based on the notion that the power that controls the first seven years of a child’s life will definitively shape his beliefs and activities thereafter, but Dario’s own life disproves this idea.

He displayed an unpredictable versatility of genius that was beyond all forecasting. Although routinely hailed as the most frequently performed contemporary dramatist anywhere, in theatre he was actor, theatre director, stage designer as well as playwright. Such works as Accidental Death Of An Anarchist or Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! secured his reputation, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997. However, he was also a political activist, pamphleteer, artist and author who produced the first of his six novels at the age of 88.

There was more to his theatre than agit-prop politics, but in awarding him the Nobel prize the Swedish Royal Academy focused, not unreasonably, on that side of his work. The citation stated that he “emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden. With a blend of laughter and gravity he opens our eyes to abuses and injustices in society, and also to the wider historical perspective in which they can be placed. Fo is an extremely serious satirist with a multifaceted oeuvre.”

It is a measure of the man that although many of his plays deal with subjects taken from the headlines of the day, he was no avant-garde, experimental dramatist, but stood foursquare in the heart of the Italian theatre tradition, in the line stretching back to the medieval jester or the harlequin.

He drew on and interpreted that tradition in his own idiosyncratic way, insisting that alongside the line of writers of established fame there was an equally powerful popular tradition which expressed the discontent of the underlings with the injustices they suffered. That was where he chose to place himself.

AT times, while remaining an atheist, he located that discontent in age-old religious themes. In 1968, he broke with “bourgeois theatre” to develop his own work and play to an audience unaccustomed to theatre-going, exactly the attitude of John McGrath and 7:84 at about the same time.

However, Dario then disconcerted his new associates by announcing that he intended to do a one-man play dealing not with strikes and demonstrations, but with themes gleamed from medieval mystery plays. He had come to believe that these works expressed the same outrage felt by the youthful revolutionaries of his own time. These sketches, including material loosely taken from Biblical sources – for instance, portraying Christ fending off a drunk at the marriage-feast of Cana, or a sketch lambasting a Renaissance pope for his opulent life-style – made up Mistero Buffo, played with such success by Robbie Coltrane in 1990.

Robbie Coltrane in Mistero Buffo (1990)

Not everyone in Italy or elsewhere was pleased to see Fo win the supreme prize in literature. His taste for “scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden” made him enemies. His militant reputation meant that for many years he and Franca were barred from Italian TV and banned from entering the USA, but also that they were subject to attacks, including a bomb attempt on the Palazzina Liberty in Milan which they had occupied and were using as their performance base. In 1973, Franca was kidnapped and raped by neo-fascist thugs who were later shown to have been acting in collusion with one of Italy’s police forces.

Dario learned a great deal of theatrical technique from Franca because, unlike him, she had theatre in her blood. She belonged to a family of touring actors of the sort which had been the backbone of Italian theatre since the 16th century and she had first appeared on stage at the age of eight days. It was a non-speaking part.

Thereafter she performed with her family, learning the techniques of improvisation and doing instinctively what other performers had to learn by study and practice.

It was Franca, as she liked to boast, who took the initiative in enticing Dario into a relationship. When they found themselves in the same company, she saw this awkward youth who was obviously attracted to her but unable to take the male part and invite her out. She pushed him against a door and kissed him passionately. She was known at the time as Italy’s Rita Hayworth, so how could any man resist? Later, she became a leading feminist, although she hated the term, appearing in one-woman shows either written by her or jointly with Dario.

Dario Fo and Franca Rame

From the start they appeared on stage together, initially in satire shows which were close to cabaret, although he always refused to employ that term which he considered too bourgeois.

From there he moved into straight theatre with two sets of one-act farces, including The Virtuous Burglar which was premiered in Britain by Ayrshire’s Borderline Company but which has become a staple of amateur troupes.

These two elements – satire and farce – were the core of all Dario’s subsequent work. His satire became more trenchant as he moved left and, with his work for his post-1968 co-operative companies, he became identified as Europe’s leading political playwright.

Farce is normally mindless slapstick and serious political drama but his gifts and skills as actor-author, backed by his belief in the riches of the rough and tumble of the popular tradition, convinced him that farce was the ideal vehicle for the drama of enjoyment and challenge, laughter with anger, that he wished to stage. It helped that, as even his adversaries had to admit, he was a supreme actor.

The dice might have rolled differently. Dario was born in the village of Valtravaglia on the shores of Lake Maggiore, and his first love was painting. “I have been painting ever since I was a boy,” he declared. In Milan, he studied art and architecture, never drama, and frequently stated that he was an amateur actor and a professional artist. It is not easy to know how serious this self-assessment was, but it was a cry for recognition of his work as an artist.

“I began painting and drawing before learning how to form numbers. I was quite good, a little phenomenon,” he said cheerfully in his autobiography, where he recalls occasions when in his home town he was invited to paint portraits of schoolmates or townspeople, including his teacher, the daughters of the mayor and even the mistress of a gangland boss.

He never stopped painting over the succeeding decades, but much of that work was conceived for theatre productions. That changed when in 1995 he suffered a stroke which left him with impaired eyesight and diminished ability to read and write. The stroke altered the direction of his creativity, but he did continue to perform. There was a regular ritual at breakfast where members of his staff read out articles which they judged of interest and which gave him material which he incorporated, in transformed satirical form, into his shows that evening.

HOWEVER, the stroke also caused him to return with renewed enthusiasm to artistic work, and with the assistance of young artists who formed the kind of studio which the great artists of the Renaissance would have recognised, he produced literally thousands of canvases. There are differing views on the quality of his work, but the range is remarkable. Alongside landscapes and portraits, there are treatments of mythological subjects, of purely fantastic scenes, of prancing horses, monsters, ships at anchor, as well as highly erotic nudes, and alongside them angry depictions of desperate immigrants braving the Mediterranean in their search for refuge.

There have been exhibitions all over Europe, and in 2015, the Italian Ministry for Culture established in Verona a gallery dedicated exclusively to the display of his work, the first time such an honour was accorded any living artist.

There was an exhibition in Edinburgh in 2016 – the only one so far held in the UK – but it was not as satisfactory as it might have been. The organisers were invited by the management in Verona to take from the collection any work they wished since the gallery was about to close for refurbishment. They chose a selection which covered his entire life-span, but Dario himself vetoed this idea since he wished to be involved in the arrangement of the permanent display of his paintings. In the event, he was taken into hospital and could neither come to Edinburgh nor oversee the permanent exhibition in Verona.

Hand-in-hand with this own original work, he became an art historian and critic. He addressed in a variety of media people who were excluded from the appreciation and enjoyment of art by the restrictive language employed by scholars and experts. He was first invited to present on TV Leonardo’s Last Supper, on the completion of restoration work, and this whetted his appetite. While in theatre history he was drawn to neglected, minor figures, in art he focused on such Old Masters as Raphael, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Correggio, Giotto, Mantegna and others, often drawing attention to a less reverent side of their work.

Simon Sharkey and Peter Mullan in Can't Pay, Won't Pay

He invented a kind of on-stage lecture-performance, either ideally suitable for TV, and produced on each of the artists richly illustrated books, often with his own reworking of famous original paintings or frescos.

This form of multiple presentation – artwork, book and performance – became his preferred style in his later years. Astonishingly in 2014, at the age of 88, he took to novel-writing, although the already elastic term “novel” was stretched to its limits in some cases. The first was given the arresting title The Pope’s Daughter, with Lucrezia Borgia – the daughter of Pope Alexander VI – as protagonist.

The spur to writing was Dario’s disgust at an international TV blockbuster, The Borgias, created by Neil Jordan and with a high-profile cast including Jeremy Irons, Holliday Grainger as Lucrezia, and Steven Berkoff and Derek Jacobi in minor roles. Dario considered the series in general and the depiction of Lucrezia in particular as upmarket porn, and set himself on a course of reading and research to restore to her the dignity destroyed by the sensationalist treatment. He produced in total six novels, all historical fiction, or faction.

Although his strength was failing, he worked furiously in his last years, giving the impression of being engaged in a desperate race against death, goaded to express all that was stored in his “teeming brain,” in Keats’s expression.

He was an admirer of both Pope Francis and St Francis of Assisi, writing several theatre works on the latter. In politics, to the dismay of many admirers, he expressed support for Beppe Grillo and his Five Star Movement.

There was also a work on Maria Callas, whom he knew from his youth, and this too took the triple format. I recall going to his house in Milan and finding him in one room dictating text to a young man seated at a computer, while in another, two young women were adding colour to a canvas whose outlines had been sketched by Dario.

But his driving obsessions in his final years were an incongruous couple: God and Charles Darwin. On a visit to a school, he was appalled at the pupils’ ignorance of evolution, and so produced two lavishly illustrated books.

The first was entitled God Is Black, based on the conceit that man is made in the image and likeness of God, and since anthropologists have discovered that the first humans emerged in Africa it follows that… The other had the title Darwin: But Are We Monkeys On The Mother’s Or Father’s Side, but the whimsical title did not conceal the seriousness of his project.

He approached God and religious culture from the distaff side, with one work entitled The Obscene Is Sacred, but he who had been excoriated by the Vatican for blasphemy now found himself praised as the only author in Italy who accorded religion the attention it merited. There was no change in his own fundamental beliefs. As he wrote: “I do not fear death. My motto is to make people laugh. I dialogue with myself about it. I am a rigorous atheist. I love life.”