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Fo, Rame and theatre of intervention

Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Harlequins of the Revolution
By Joseph Farrell
Methuen, 2001
308 pp, $49.95 (hb)

REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON

Dario Fo and Franca Rame hit certain nerves. Neo-fascists bombed their theatre in Milan and threw tear gas grenades at them during a performance in Buenos Aries. Italian state officials waged bureaucratic war on them. Police spied on and arrested them, the press vilified them, the Vatican denounced them and TV stations banned them. They were denied visas to enter the US.

Joseph Farrell's excellent biography of Fo and Rame, partners in life and Italian theatre, documents how their witty farces about state power and capitalist greed upset both the establishment and the extreme right.

Fo was born to anti-fascist parents in Italy in 1926. He fell in love with theatre, oppositionist politics and Franca Rame, who he married in 1954. Leftist though not yet revolutionary, Fo and Rame worked in mainstream theatres, posing awkward questions about the post-war "economic miracle" and the Cold War stifling of dissent.

The censors were alerted to the budding subversives. The bobbing lights of torches held by officials, following Fo and Rame's red-inked scripts in the dark, became a familiar sight at performances. The first of the neo-fascist bomb threats followed soon after, as did the 1962 banning of the couple from television after a pilot show raised howls of protest from political and clerical reactionaries.

Though blacklisted, Fo and Rame remained celebrities. They toured Italy performing in alternative venues, including factories occupied by striking workers. The focus was on Fo in the role of jester, a "vehicle against violence, cruelty, hypocrisy and injustice", notably in one of his best works, the one-man show Mistero Buffo.

By the intensely radical late-'60s, Rame had joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and Fo had declared himself a Marxist (if a highly idiosyncratic and contradictory one, innately distrustful of all organisation but extremely indulgent of Mao). They set up Nuova Scena, a New Left theatre collective which was committed to the revolutionary aim of "bringing the working class to power".

@BODYCONTRACT = Nuova Scena adhered to democracy in all matters, including the content of Fo's plays. A typical performance dismantled the "bourgeois" barrier between stage and stalls, with discussions between actors and audience at the end of the play that often stretched until dawn.

Although they attracted huge audiences, internal discord soon rained on their success. Ultra-left political activists with no theatre skills, Trotskyist sectarians, infuriating anarchist purists and assorted eccentrics turned Nuova Scena's democracy into a cult, with demands for more "militancy" in Fo's plays and for lead roles to be given to less talented actors. The result was poor plays on stage, tears and temper-tantrums off-stage, and schisms and splits in the collective.

An exasperated Fo and Rame formed a new collective, La Commune, in 1970. Headquartered in Milan, their theatre became a cultural and political campaigning centre for the issues of the day, from the Palestinian struggle for self-determination to abortion rights.

When a neo-fascist bombing of a Milan bank in December 1969 killed 16 and injured 90, and two anarchists were framed and one killed in an "accidental" fall from a window ledge of a police station, Fo's response was the Accidental Death of an Anarchist. This play poked wicked fun at the complicity of judges, police, bureaucracy and army officers in the bombing and the subsequent cover-up.

Immensely popular in Italy (when refused a theatrical venue in Bologna, Fo and Rame performed the play to a crowd of 6000 in the city's sports stadium), the play has since become a popular all-purpose protest play for adaptation in many other countries from England to Japan.

Unlike the 700,000 people who each year attended a La Commune political entertainment, the authorities were not amused. When Rame set up Red Aid to defend the human rights of the swelling population of left-wing political prisoners (including Red Brigade terrorists), police and politicians demonised Rame and Fo, all in the name of virtuous anti-terrorist principles, even though Rame and Fo were strong critics of the use of terror by the left.

In 1973, the state reached deeper into its bag of dirty tricks, kidnapping Rame who was tortured and raped in the back of a van as it drove around Milan. For hours, she was beaten, sexually assaulted, burnt with cigarette stubs and had her breasts slashed with razors. Later enquiries revealed that the assault was commissioned and planned by senior police, with support from the top levels of the ministries of interior and defence.

What broke La Commune, however, was not state-sanctioned violence but the poison of left-wing sectarianism which forced Fo and Rame to abandon the collective and go out on their own. A highlight of their non-didactic "theatre of intervention" was Can't Pay? Won't Pay! in 1974, which explored the spontaneous movement, particularly by women, to refuse to pay increased prices when inflation spiralled to dizzy heights.

The success of Fo's plays vindicated his views on art and politics. Like Lenin, Fo believed that although art was a "small cog in the mechanism of class struggle", even small cogs are essential. Fo's cog turned on the wheels of the best elements of a satirical and hopeful popular culture, which Fo contrasted to the "vacuous tripe" of commercial popular culture, the "shallow nihilism" of the avant-garde and the "pessimism" of bourgeois culture.

Although Fo and Rame denounced the PCI's government partnership with the Christian Democrats in the 1970s, the so-called "historic compromise" emitted one ray of warmth to Fo and Rame, still languishing out in the official cultural cold. They were invited back onto public television, where their first up performance of Mistero Buffo provoked a conservative hue and cry about Fo's "ideological hooliganism" and religious blasphemy. This flapdoodle proved to be excellent publicity, with more people watching, and loving, the Fo-Rame series than any other program in the history of Italian television at the time.

With the ebb of mass political action and socialist ideas catching Fo and Rame in its pull, social issues displaced revolution as their material, and a more introspective and subdued tone became evident.

The upside was an engagement with feminism. With more input into their scripts and her roles, Rame produced some feminist theatre (such as 25 Monologues for a Woman) to rival Fo's achievements.

Rame was a feminist who rejected patriarchy theory (men were not the enemy, class society was) although her liberated woman was one who enjoyed equality within marriage, rather than overturned women's maternal role. Due public recognition was given to the complementary strengths of Fo (the prime creative writer) and Rame (who edited and rehearsed the plays into performing shape).

Although a temporary separation from Rame, and a stroke in 1995 which left him 80% blind, soured Fo's triumphs, his Nobel Prize for literature in 1997 was a welcome reward. It was greeted with acclaim by most artists but indignant abuse by all Fo's old enemies.

Ecclesiastical and political conservatives complained that Fo's work was not "proper" literature, containing no delicate psychology of character to be probed by brooding introspection. This complaint failed to recognise that Fo was working in the outward-looking, rumbustious, social tradition of farce which has its own artistic standards. The complaint also disguised the right-wing critics' real beef, which was their fear of the politically liberating laughter of farce.

Fo and Rame spent their lifetimes aggravating state officials, censors, politicians, popes, capitalists, magistrates, police and neo-fascists in cahoots with the authorities. Fo and Rame made theatre comic, popular and, above all, dangerous. Their lives were well spent.

From Green Left Weekly, July 3, 2002.
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