(1926- ) playwright
Dario Fo was born in San Giano, Italy, to Pina (Rota) Fo, an author, and Felice Fo, who divided his time between acting in an amateur theater company and work as a railway station master. As a child, Fo spent vacations with his grandparents on a farm and traveled around the countryside with his grandfather, selling produce from a wagon. His grandfather told imaginative stories infused with local news to attract customers. This was Fo’s introduction to the narrative tradition. In his youth, he sat for hours in taverns, listening to glassblowers and fishermen spin tall tales filled with political satire, planting the seeds of his own satirical work.
Fo moved to Milan in 1940 to study art at the Brera Art Academy. During this time, he began to write stories and sketches that were influenced by traveling storytellers. “Nothing gets down as deeply into the mind and intelligence as satire,” Fo said in a statement cited by James Fisher. “The end of satire is the first alarm bell signaling the end of real democracy.”
Much of Fo’s satire focuses on political-religious issues. His one-man show Comical Mystery (1969), for example, was a mockery of Catholic hierarchy. The play, considered a cornerstone of his collective work, is his own version of the Gospels with commentary on church corruption.
Sketches in his play include one about a man without legs who shuns a healing from Christ and another depicting a wedding feast at Cana told from the perspective of a drunkard. The show was presented on television in 1977. According to Tony Mitchell in Dario Fo: People’s Court Jester, the Vatican described the program as the “most blasphemous show in the history of television.”
In 1970, Fo performed I’d Die Tonight If I Didn’t Think It Had Been Worth It (1970), a play comparing Palestinian freedom fighters and Italian partisans. He followed this the same year with Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970), a play about an anarchist who dies while in police custody. The play closed at the Cinema Rossini when police pressured the theater owners.
More than 40 of Fo’s plays have been translated into dozens of languages. Fo himself has also performed on radio and film and once hosted a controversial Italian television program in 1962. In 1997, he won the Nobel Prize in literature for his theatrical contributions, which emphasized international topics ranging from AIDS to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Another Work by Dario Fo
We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay! and Other Plays. Translated by Ron Jenkins. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001.
Works about Dario Fo
Fisher, James. “Images of the Fool in Italian Theatre from Pirandello to Fo.” Available online at http://persweb.wabash.edu/facstaff/fisherj/new/ItalianTheatre.html Mitchell, Tony. Dario Fo: People’s Court Jester. London: Methuen, 1999.
