Dario Fo

Biography

On the evening of 9 October 1997 Fo was driving along the Milan–Rome motorway to record a television programme. A car pulled up alongside, and someone held a sheet of paper up to the window: “You won the Nobel.” That, by his own account, is how he learned of the prize.

He was born on 24 March 1926 in Sangiano, in the Province of Varese, near the shore of Lake Maggiore, the eldest of three children. His father, Felice Fo, was a station master on the state railway, an amateur actor and a socialist; his mother, Pina Rota, came from a peasant family. The family was often moved from post to post along the Swiss border. Fo learned storytelling from his maternal grandfather and from Lombard fishermen and glassblowers. His parents, according to several accounts, smuggled refugees and Allied soldiers into Switzerland.

His war years are described in conflicting ways. Fo himself said that he was drafted into the army of the Italian Social Republic, Mussolini’s Salò state, and then went into hiding; the testimony of former partisans and fellow soldiers, and a ruling of the court of Varese of 15 February 1979, state that he served in its units. The matter caused disputes and lawsuits for many years.

He came to Milan to study at the Brera Academy: in 1940 according to some sources, in 1942 according to others. After the war he returned there, completed the course in painting, and at the same time enrolled in architecture at the Politecnico di Milano. He began a thesis on the architecture of ancient Rome but did not sit the final examinations and left in 1953. By then he was already painting and performing improvised monologues in small Milan theatres.

In 1950 Fo began working with Franco Parenti on a variety show for radio actors. In late 1951 the state broadcaster RAI commissioned from him a series of eighteen monologues, “Poer nano” (“Poor Thing”), retelling biblical and historical stories. The alarmed management cancelled the series, but in 1952 Fo staged it at the Teatro Odeon in Milan. In 1953, with Parenti and Giustino Durano, he wrote, directed and designed the revue “Il dito nell’occhio” (“A Finger in the Eye”), and until 1967 the music for his plays was written by Fiorenzo Carpi. Fo met the actress Franca Rame during the revue “Sette giorni a Milano” and married her on 24 June 1954. For the sake of work in film the family moved to Rome: from 1955 he wrote screenplays, and in 1956 he acted alongside Rame in Carlo Lizzani’s film “Lo svitato” (“The Screwball”).

In 1958 they returned to Milan and founded the Fo–Rame company. He wrote plays, acted, directed and drew costumes and sets, while Rame ran the theatre’s business. The first major success was the comedy “Archangels Don’t Play Pinball” (1959), which was performed in Yugoslavia, Poland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Spain.

In 1962 Fo wrote and directed the variety programme “Canzonissima” for RAI. The censors intervened so often that on 29 November 1962, after a dispute over a sketch about dangerous working conditions on building sites, he and Rame walked out. RAI sued them and destroyed the recordings, and Fo did not appear on television for fourteen years. After 1968 he and Rame left the mainstream theatres. They set up the collective Nuova Scena and played in workers’ clubs and community centres, and in 1970 they founded the collective La Comune. Fo himself was never a member of the Communist Party, but he criticised its policies openly, and this led to conflicts.

The first performance of “Mistero Buffo” took place on 1 October 1969 in Sestri Levante. Fo played all the roles alone, in free reworkings of ancient texts in grammelot, a theatrical language that merely imitates the rhythm and intonation of real ones. The basis was a mixture of dialects of the Po Valley. Television broadcast “Mistero Buffo” in 1977, and Cardinal Ugo Poletti called it “the most blasphemous show in the history of television”.

“Accidental Death of an Anarchist” opened in December 1970. Fo wrote it after the 1969 bombing at the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura in Milan; the play contains a clear allusion to the death of the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli. At its centre is a Maniac who disguises himself in turn as a psychiatrist, a judge and a bishop, and the official version falls apart before our eyes. In 1974 the farce “Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!” was staged; by 1990 it had been performed in 35 countries.

In March 1973 Franca Rame was abducted and raped by five neofascists, and according to rumours this was done on the orders of high-ranking Carabinieri officers. In September of that year, after the death of Salvador Allende, Fo staged “The People’s War in Chile”; in November police arrested him in Sassari. In 1974 the company occupied an abandoned market building in the Porta Vittoria district and named it the Palazzina Liberty, and in 1981 they were evicted from it.

The American authorities refused Fo and Rame entry more than once, in 1980 and 1983. In New York in May 1980 an “Evening Without Dario Fo and Franca Rame” was held, attended by Arthur Miller and Martin Scorsese. He worked in opera as well. In 1987 in Amsterdam he directed and designed Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville”, and went on to stage other Rossini operas. In 1989 came the comedy “The Pope and the Witch”; in 1992, for the quincentenary of the discovery of America, the monologue “Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas”.

The Swedish Academy cited Fo as a writer who, following the jesters of the Middle Ages, scourges authority and upholds the dignity of the downtrodden. He said that in 1975, when he was first nominated for the prize, he thought the idea absurd. In the early years of the twenty-first century he wrote satires on Silvio Berlusconi. Senator Marcello Dell’Utri sued over the comedy “The Two-Headed Anomaly” (2003), and its television broadcast was briefly held up. In 2001 Fo became a Satrap of the Collège de ’Pataphysique. In 2006 he ran in the primary of the centre-left coalition The Union to choose its candidate for mayor of Milan and won about 23 per cent of the vote, finishing behind the former police chief Bruno Ferrante. That same year the Sapienza University of Rome gave him an honorary doctorate. In 2012 the exhibition “Lazzi Sberleffi Dipinti” opened at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, showing more than four hundred of his works.

His last book is called “Razza di Zingaro” (2016).

In it he told the story of the Sinto boxer Johann Trollmann, who was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp; Fo’s paintings on the subject were exhibited the same year in Milan, in Brera. He died on 13 October 2016 in Milan, at the Luigi Sacco Hospital. The lying in state took place on 14 October in the foyer of Milan’s Piccolo Teatro. He is buried in the family niche in Milan’s Monumental Cemetery, above the niche of Franca Rame.