March 12, 2020 23
The People’s Clowns
Tim Parks
Dario Fo and Franca Rame:
Theatre, Politics, Life
by Joseph Farrell.
Slingsby: Methuen, 474 pp., £25.00
A biography of Dario Fo and his wife,
Franca Rame, is inevitably a history
of Italy in their lifetimes and particu-
larly in the decades from 1950 to 1990,
when their careers as playwrights, ac-
tors, and political activists were at their
peak. Play by play, show by show, Fo
engaged in fierce polemics with more
or less every aspect of Italian society.
His work, as Joseph Farrell observes in
Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Theatre,
Politics, Life, contains none of the in-
timacy, intellectual cogitation, or exis-
tential angst that one finds in so many
artists of the twentieth century. Nor
can his excellent biographer find much
of it in the life. All Fo’s energies were
invested in the theater, or in the clash
for which the theater, and occasionally
television, were his chosen instruments.
Once drawn into the influence of this
brilliant comet, Rame became one with
it, no doubt altering its trajectory and
intensifying its light, but not changing
its essential nature. For a biography
of a couple there is remarkably little
that touches on their private world to-
gether—perhaps because there was no
private world. Their life simply was this
bright, festive, cruel light they shone
on Italian society. And whatever one
thinks about the aesthetic value of this
or that play, their endeavors always had
the virtue of forcing all sides to come
out in the open and declare themselves.
As a consequence, Farrell’s book is one
of the best introductions to postwar
Italy I have come across.
Fo was born in 1926 in a village near
Lake Maggiore, fifty miles northwest of
Milan. His father was a station master,
his mother of peasant stock. The el-
dest of three children, he enlisted his
younger brother and sister as audience
and supporting actors in home theatri-
cals and puppet shows. From the first,
Dario was prime mover, energizer, and
star. At age fourteen, his promise was
such that his parents sent him to Milan,
where he attended the Brera Liceo, a
school attached to the city’s foremost
art college.
At seventeen, this cheerful adoles-
cent received call-up papers to join the
army of the Italian Social Republic,
the northern Italian state that Mus-
solini had formed with Nazi support
after the Allied invasion of Italy from
the south in 1943. Fo’s parents were
antifascists. Other young men fled to
the mountains to join the partisan re-
sistance. Fo, however, as he later said,
“preferred to choose a waiting position
and try to dodge the call-up with trick-
ery.” Eventually he volunteered for a
unit he hoped would not be engaged
in fighting. He deserted, re enlisted,
and deserted again, hoping “to hide
away, to come home with my skin in-
tact.” It was an uncertain start to an
adult life that would later be marked
by a willingness to assume radically
antiauthoritarian positions in the face
of aggressive harassment. Perhaps the
difference in 1944 was that Fo didn’t
perceive the battle as his own; he was
merely a pawn. “In the unpromising
surroundings of his barracks,” Farrell
remarks, “Dario managed to perform
some comic monologues.”
Between 1945 and 1950, while study-
ing painting and architecture in Milan,
Fo was gradually drawn toward the
theater. On the train to Lake Maggiore
and back, he would entertain other
passengers with comic performances
mocking the status quo. A “Puckish
mischief-maker,” as Farrell describes
him, he invented all kinds of practical
jokes, on one occasion selling tickets
to a supposed reception for Picasso in
Milan, then producing a janitor from
Brera who had some resemblance to
the artist. He began attending plays di-
rected by the socialist Giorgio Strehler
at the newly opened Piccolo Teatro. He
read Gramsci’s books, which encour-
aged the rediscovery and reevaluation
of popular culture as a necessary step
on the road to a Marxist revolution. In
1950 he asked Franco Parenti, a suc-
cessful theater and radio actor, to listen
to his monologues. Parenti was im-
pressed, and later that year the twenty-
four-year-old Fo signed a contract with
RAI (Italian Public Broadcasting) to
produce twelve solo shows. His career
had begun.Despite its uneven quality, there is a
remarkable consistency to Fo’s work
over the years, and to the turbulence
that invariably develops around it. It
begins with an act of appropriation and
inversion. A well-known story—Cain
and Abel, David and Goliath, Romeo
and Juliet, Hamlet, Christopher Co-
lumbus, Rigoletto—is taken and turned
upside dow n ; we sympath i ze w ith C ain,
with Goliath, with Juliet’s parents; the
“official” version of history is perverse
and serves a ruling elite. Fo collected
his early monologues under the title
Poer nano—literally “poor dwarf,”but with the colloquial meaning “poor
sod,” “poor loser.” The world’s injus-
tices are seen from the point of view of
the victim, but the sparkling comedy
that Fo injected into his performances
transforms this loser into a winner.
RAI suspected a political agenda
and broke off the relationship. It was
an outcome Fo would grow used to. In
one monologue, based on the Rigoletto
story, he played a jester who, as Farrell
puts it, “faces the dilemma of being ei-
ther court entertainer, and hence the
plaything of authority, or the voice of
the people.” It was Fo’s own quandary.
RAI wanted light entertainment. Fo re-
sisted. Very likely the pressure to keep
politics out of his work led to his be-
coming more “the voice of the people”
than he originally planned. The tension
was fruitful.
Without the radio work, he fell back
on cabaret and variety, and in 1951 he
found himself in the same show as the
blond, glamorous, wonderfully lively
Franca Rame. She was three years
younger than him and came from a
family of traveling actors who could
trace back their involvement in popu-
lar theater for hundreds of years. Es-
sentially, the Rames wrote the outlines
of their stories, often borrowing them
from existing plays and novels, then im-
provised onstage in the Italian tradition
of commedia dell’arte. It was theater
without the authorial figures of writer
and director, and as such emblematic of
the popular culture that Gramsci had
sought to champion. Fo was fascinated.
But he did not court Franca. “His
grin was toothy,” Farrell says, “his nose
jutted out like a small promontory,
his arms dangled, his legs were seem-
ingly out of proportion to his trunk and
his gait was gangling and tumbling.”
In short, Dario was no Adonis, and
Franca, he later remembered, “was al-ways pursued by hosts of men prepared
to go to any lengths. I didn’t want to
enter the lists.” Eventually, Franca
took the initiative and kissed Dario
backstage. All too soon the couple had
to borrow money for an illegal abor-
tion. Then the “gorgeous bitch,” as
Dario described her, left him. Dario
had to wait until they were working
together in his first show “to win her
back.” In 1954 the two married, Farrell
writes, “to please her devoutly Catholic
mother,” and in 1955 Franca gave birth
to their only child, Jacopo.
Fo never went to drama school and
had no formal training as an actor or
director. Nor did he have any ambition
to have his plays published as literary
works. What mattered was the moment
of performance, when he was trium-
phant, and often triumphantly himself,
as storyteller rather than character
actor. The problem throughout his ca-
re er wo u l d b e t o c re at e a fo r m o f t h e at er
that suited his talents and made sense
in the rapidly changing sociopoliti-
cal circumstances in which he moved.
Crucially, in the two shows he put on
with Parenti at the Piccolo Teatro in
the 1950s, A Poke in the Eye and Mad-
house for the Sane, Fo was able to draw
on the stagecraft of Strehler and take
lessons with the mime expert Jacques
Lecoq, who also helped him, accord-
ing to Farrell, to “acquire that range of
laughs and onomatopoeic vocalisations
which were indispensable to his mono-
logues and enabled him to reproduce
everything from storms at sea to tigers
licking wounds.”
In the theater as on the radio, de-
bunking conventional viewpoints in
a carnival atmosphere proved at once
popular and controversial. On tour, his
shows met resistance from church and
local authorities. The script of Mad-
house for the Sane, Farrell writes, “was
massacred by the censors” working
under the direct supervision of the fu-
ture prime minister Giulio Andreotti,
then an undersecretary of state. Fo
chose to ignore the changes they de-
manded and got away with it.
Alongside these invigorating battles
with the conservative establishment,
there were also disagreements with
collaborators. Strehler was a champion
of Brecht; Fo found his approach too
complacent in positing a savvy middle-
class audience. Parenti was an admirer
of French absurdism, of Ionesco and
Beckett; Fo found these writers too
intellectual and abstract. He wanted
a more direct, seductive relationship
with his audience. He did not want to
be trapped in a rigid script.In 1956 he and Franca went to Rome
and made a film, Lo svitato (The
Screwball), reminiscent of Jacques
Tati. It flopped, an experience far worse
than getting fired for being provoca-
tively popular. “Years later,” Farrell
observes, “he could repeat audience
figures in various cinemas in Rome, re-
cite box office takings in an experimen-
tal cinema in Milan.” He had failed, Fo
felt, because actors were powerless in
the cinema. He had lost control of the
product. It must never happen again.
He and Franca returned to Milan,
set up their own theater company, andDario Fo and Franca Rame, Milan, 1962GiorgioLotti/Mondadori/GettyImages