of those on this one that marvel staking one's life on convictions
and with a sense of humour and creativity, I'd like to fwd
this to do with Dario Fo and the Italian election, very impressive,
(ps to Geert, the 'we are the most difficult animals' post, if it's alright,
I'd still like it in the next psychic rotunda (over 50 contributors,
well worth earning a copy with your excellent statement
on compassion and thoughtfulness of last month)) thanx
ok here's Dario:
Dario Fo: Italian political theatre
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,18873580-16947,00.html
Wily old anarchist rejoices
Dario Fo is enjoying the spectacle of life imitating art, writes Natasha Bita in Florence
April 21, 2006
DARIO Fo is in a gleeful mood. "Dio!" he crows down the line from Milan. "God, what incredible
luck we've had!" At 80, the Nobel prize-winning playwright, comic actor and theatre director has
lost none of his radical zeal. Italy's most subversive satirist is celebrating the narrow defeat
of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's right-wing prime minister and billionaire media mogul, in this
month's photo-finish election.
"It's terribly funny, ironic and farcical," he raves. "Berlusconi did everything to give himself
an advantage. He made up the rules, the laws; he threw all the election regulations in the air
with a frightful arrogance. And now all of it has fallen back on top of him."
To Fo, the defeat of Italy's richest and most powerful man at the ballot box is particularly
sweet. His wife, lead actor and script collaborator Franca Rame has been elected to the Italian
parliament as a left-wing candidate for the Italy of Values party, led by former anti-corruption
judge Antonio Di Pietro.
Fo has spent a lifetime poking fun at the rich, the powerful and the corrupt. His plays have
satirised and criticised officialdom, corruption, organised crime and the Catholic Church, and
tackled the controversies of drug addiction, abortion, prostitution and infidelity at a time when
they were topics not to be talked about in public.
Fo's works - including Accidental Death of an Anarchist, which opens at the Playhouse Theatre in
Perth next Wednesday - are the most widely translated of any living Italian author. Yet in his
home country Fo's anti-establishment satires have earned him not only acclaim but censorship,
lawsuits, bashings and death threats.
His first play, Il dito nell'occhio (The Finger in the Eye), penned in 1953, derided the
conservative social mores of the time and earned the ire of the Vatican: signs were posted on
church doors exhorting parishioners not to see the play. A decade later, his family was placed
under police protection after a television sketch with a Mafia theme brought death threats written
in blood.
In the early 1960s, Fo and Rame were banned from Italy's public broadcaster, RAI, for 15 years
after a falling-out over censorship. When right-wing protesters assaulted the couple after a
performance in Rome, militant communists guarded the theatre.
As the world's youth rebelled against the establishment, sparking the civil rights and feminism
movements, anti-war protests and left-wing demonstrations of the late '60s, Fo's subversive
societal observations won a cult following. He set up an independent theatre collective that
toured community halls, factories, sports arenas, town squares and cinemas to perform for the
working class.
The couple's left-wing leanings and anarchical sympathies came at a painful personal cost. Despite
protests from Arthur Miller and Martin Scorsese, they were banned from the US until president
Ronald Reagan intervened to grant them visas in 1984.
Shockingly, Rame was kidnapped, tortured and raped by a group of fascists in 1974.
Two months later, she bravely took to the stage to star in Enough with the Fascists, a play
recounting the birth, history and violence of fascism.
A saboteur lobbed a tear-gas grenade into the audience during a performance in 1983 in Argentina,
where Mistero Buffo attracted stone-throwing protesters and Catholic demonstrators bearing
religious placards.
In 1995 Fo suffered a stroke, losing most of his sight. He recovered in time to receive the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1997, awarded for his talent in emulating the jesters of the Middle Ages in
"scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden".
Fo still suffers for his art. One of Berlusconi's closest allies, Forza Italia senator Marcello
Dell'Utri, who is appealing against his conviction in 2004 for colluding with the Mafia, is suing
Fo for damages to the tune of E1 million ($1.65 million), based on allegations of "unfounded,
personal attacks" in the satirical play The Two-headed Anomaly, which pokes fun at Berlusconi.
Unrepentant, Fo reckons he might find the material for another work in Italy's dramatic election
campaign, in which Berlusconi repeatedly referred to left-wing voters as "stupid arseholes" and
notoriously claimed that Chinese communists boiled babies for fertiliser. "A joke," Fo says of the
election. "It really is a farce, commedia dell'arte."
Pining for the social insurgence of his youth, Fo is heartened by the student uprising in France,
where rioting youths have forced the Government to abandon a job-creation plan that would have
diminished job security for younger workers. "It is a victory by youth, not against abstract
problems but problems of work, of survival," Fo says.
Citing the 18th-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, he argues that history repeats
itself in a cycle. "We're living in a time of great awareness among young people, a consciousness
which is maturing after a silence that endured for 30 years," he says. "There was a drop-off, a
free fall, but now it is growing with great vigour."
Fo readily identifies with the anti-globalisation and green movements. "Certainly I sympathise
with them, and have also participated," he says. "But they must be careful of provocation, and be
vigilant to avoid losing control, because the Right can hardly wait to strike back through the
police and positions of power."
Fo's own political ambitions were dashed - perhaps only temporarily - in January, when he failed
in an attempt to be selected as the centre-left candidate for the mayoralty of his home town,
Milan, losing to the city's former police chief.
The irony is not lost on him. Accidental Death of an Anarchist, one of his most successful plays,
is a farce based on the death of an anarchist who fell from the fourth-floor window of a police
station during his interrogation over the left-wing bombing of a bank in 1969.
But for now, Fo has reality-TV shows in his sights. "This has been the great season of the banal,
the vulgar, the obvious," he laments of the success of programs such as Big Brother, Island of the
Famous and Distraction, a new quiz show in which contestants strip and urinate to distract their
opponents.
Fo argues that public broadcasters have a duty to not compete in the ratings against their
commercial rivals. Commercial TV may boast more viewers, he says, but public TV ought to offer
"more information, more accuracy, and more art".
"We are a nation that has immense treasures that we have distributed all over the world," he
boasts of Italy's cultural contribution. "We taught all the nations of Europe in the 1500s and
1600s how to realise a new life through humanism, the Renaissance.
"We must return to that level. I think there will be a change."
Accidental Death of an Anarchist is at the Playhouse Theatre, Perth, from Wednesday until May 6.
Previews tomorrow and on Monday.
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