24 The New York Review
produced a string of slapstick farces
complete with song and dance. These
were the years of the postwar boom,
a general economic optimism coupled
with touchy Catholic conservatism.
Fo was seen as “a scoffing but jovial
bohemian rather than... an enraged
iconoclast.” This beguiling image was
reinforced when the couple agreed to
take over the TV program Carosello,
ten minutes of short sketches, each ad-
vertising a different product or brand.
Still available on YouTube, these hi-
larious pieces show a charmingly goofy
Fo playing dumb beside the volup-
tuous Franca, the punchline of each
two- minute routine producing a well-
known brand name like a rabbit from
a hat. With only one state-run chan-
nel, Italian television was so tediously
predictable that Carosello became the
most popular program.
In Milan too the couple’s comple-
mentary charisma was outselling every
other Italian theater of the time. The
titles of their shows—Thieves Manne-
quins and Naked Women, Bodies in the
Post and Women in the Nude—invited
audiences to expect risqué material;
light comedy was mixed with political
protest, against the church’s strangle-
hold on public mores, corruption in
the building industry, or bourgeois
hypocrisy. Stock figures appeared: the
faux-naif who shows up society’s sham,
the prostitute with the golden heart,
the madman as the only sane person
in a crazy world. Fo was always the
lead actor, Franca always the leading
lady, ever ready to appear in a negli-
gée to keep audiences happy. Did the
plays amount to literature, asked the
theater magazine Sipario, when it pub-
lished the script of Archangels Don’t
Play Pinball? The “best” of the play,
it decided, existed only onstage in “the
bare-knuckled struggle in which Dario
Fo the actor and Dario Fo the author
engage... to gain the upper hand.” Fo
was competing with Fo. He needed
stiffer opposition.
He found it in 1962. Invited to take
over RAI’s hugely successful TV vari-
ety show Canzonissima, Fo injected
some sharp political satire into a rou-
tine of “high-kicking, scantily clad,
sequinned dancing girls,” ridiculing
the complacency surrounding Italy’s
economic miracle and the fawning sub-
servience of the white-collar classes.
In one sketch, a demented employee
caresses and worships the statue of his
boss. Typically, the more successful the
program became, the more opposition
Fo encountered. Finally, a sketch show-
ing a construction magnate refusing to
spend money on safety measures, then
taking his mistress to buy expensive
jewelry, was banned. Fo and Rame
walked out. They would not be allowed
back on national television for fourteen
years. But their name was made, and
Fo, who thrived on antagonism, had
understood that controversy and celeb-
rity could be one and the same thing.
In the mid-1960s the Italian economy
took a dive while a growing permissive-
ness drew audiences to plays that were
open ly provocative. Socia l con fl ict took
on a new edge. Back in the theater, Fo
found ways of dramatizing the kind of
tension he had experienced at RAI and
taunting his audiences. One play ends
with a chorus of asylum inmates, whose
brains have been surgically altered to
make them acquiescent, singing, “We
are happy, we are content with the
brain we have.”
But box-office success now made Fo
wonder if the pleasures of his clown-
ing and Franca’s witty glamour weren’t
making the shows too anodyne. See-
ing a fur-coated lady entirely happy
with her night out made him anxious.
Again and again, Farrell’s biography
describes Fo wrestling with the ques-
tion of how to combine the enjoyment
theater must afford with the arousal
of a socially transformative anger that
would make it relevant and important.
He thirsted for bigger battles, more
radical victories. He visited Commu-
nist Eastern Europe, Cuba, declared
himself a Marxist. He ransacked his-
tory for accounts of social conflict that
could be dramatized as analo-
gous to contemporary life. Ca-
tharsis was condemned as a
bourgeois trick that reconciled
the spectator to injustice.
Most of all, he began to see
himself as a man with a mission,
in the tradition of the giullare,
the jester or court fool who in-
vents stories that speak truth to
power and galvanize the popu-
lace. He would spend much
time over the coming years re-
searching and to a degree falsi-
fying this historic figure, in an
attempt to give dignity to the
special position he was creating
for himself. When social un-
rest exploded across Europe in
1968, Fo and Rame abandoned
the conventional theater circuit
and set up an actors’ coopera-
tive, Nuova Scena, which would
play in Communist Party clubs
around the country, returning
theater to its popular origins
and putting their talents “at
the service of the revolutionary
forces.”Farrell’s account of this en-
deavor points up its fertile
contradictions. Fo and the increasingly
politicized Rame insisted that Nuova
Scena would be egalitarian; everyone
would have a say, everyone would be
paid the same. Yet there was an abyss
between their talent and that of the
young, left-wing intellectuals their
venture attracted. Resentment against
capitalism could quickly morph into
bitterness toward Fo and Rame for
staying in expensive hotels, hogging
the limelight, and cashing their royalty
checks, which did not form part of the
equal payroll package. On the other
hand, audiences wanted Dario and
Franca, not the others. Farrell reports
energy-sapping discussions “conducted
in a sub-Marxist jargon... as impen-
etrable as the disputations of medieval
monks.”
Just as Fo had offended RAI when
he worked for them, now he offended
the Communist Party on which he de-
pended for his venues. Seizing on issues
of the day and putting them directly to
his audience, he drew parallels between
the American presence in Vietnam and
the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia,
while one play showed the Communist
mayor of Bologna waltzing with the
city’s cardinal. The Communist paper
L’Unità accused Fo of “errors of evalu-
ation and perspective.” Some venues
no longer wanted him. Meanwhile,
Nuova Scena played to 240,000 people
across Italy, 90 percent of whom had
never been to a theater before. Each
performance was followed by a debatewith the audience that could go on late
into the night. It was exhausting.
In 1969 Fo launched the Mistero
buffo—funny or buffoonish mystery—
monologues and at last achieved the
leap of quality that would lay the basis
for his Nobel Prize in 1997. In his search
for new material and popular rather
than elite forms of theater, he had be-
come fascinated by the Middle Ages
and in particular the tradition of Chris-
tian mystery plays and apocryphal sto-
ries of Christ’s life. Many of these had
been reworked by Renaissance art-
ists, in particular the actor-playwright
Angelo Beolco, better known as Ruz-
zante, who had become Fo’s idol anddesignated precursor. Appropriating,
translating, and rewriting, Fo worked
these stories up into a cycle of mono-
logues that could go on for many hours.
The performance began with his ad-
dressing the audience directly to de-
nounce the scandalous suppression of
this more lively version of the Christian
story, together with the figure of the
giullare—the jester—who had once told
that story. The authorities, he claimed,
obstructed popular creativity because
it undermined their power. He then
gave an outline of the stories, drawing
provocative parallels with issues of the
day. All this was in standard Italian.
The audience now primed, Fo trans-
formed himself into the jester figure,
launching into the monologue itself in
a demotic onomatopoeic gibberish, or
grammelot, that mixed various north-
ern Italian dialects, Latin and French,
archaisms, neologisms, and acoustic ef-
fects of every kind. For Italians brought
up speaking both dialect and standard
Italian—the norm in the 1960s—there
was at once a powerful feeling of rec-
ognition and intimacy, and the impres-
sion of being shifted into some carnival
space in a distant past.
Incantatory and often glitteringly in-
comprehensible, this torrent of strange
language was clarified by the most en-
ergetic miming as Fo acted out all the
parts in his story in an irresistible tour
de force. A gravedigger sells seats to
people eager to see Jesus raise Lazarus
from the dead. A woman whose babyhas been killed by Herod’s soldiers
believes it has been transformed into
a lamb. The boy Jesus tries to make
friends by showing off a few miracles,
then turns a rich bully to terracotta. A
drunkard rejoices in the quality of wine
at the Marriage at Cana. The execrable
Pope Boniface dresses in all his finery
but is shocked when he meets Jesus in
rags carrying his cross to Calvary.
Mistero buffo is a rich and flexible
package, the perfect vehicle for Fo’s exu-
berant genius. Crucially, while attacking
injustice and a corrupt church, the sto-
ries leave respect for the Christian story
intact. In this regard they might even be
seen as tame and conservative, though
that was not how they were per-
ceived at the time, as audiences
flocked to watch Fo at the top of
his game and in total control of
what was now exciting, meticu-
lously prepared material.
Can Mistero buffo be per-
formed without Fo’s special cha-
risma? Can it be translated? In
October 2019 Mario Pirovano
presented the monologues in a
fiftieth-anniversary production
in Milan. Pirovano spent a long
time living with Fo and Rame,
learned to imitate him, and
even to a degree looks like him.
He has the mime, the dialect,
and the grammelot down to a T.
But one only need see a video of
Fo’s versions to appreciate how
much more dazzling his perfor-
mances were, how aggressive
the political commentary he
worked into his introductions.
En glish translations of the
pieces preserve no trace of the
linguistic wealth of the original.Nineteen sixty-nine was also
the year that left-wing terror-
ism began in earnest. Advo-
cates of revolution rather than
reform, Fo and Rame condemned the
violence but became objects of intense
police surveillance, particularly after
Rame formed Red Aid, an organiza-
tion that offered support to imprisoned
terrorism suspects. Nuova Scena was
shut down and the company Comune
formed, to act out parables of political
strife in factories and workers’ clubs
up and down the country. Typically, Fo
insisted that the company bring all the
technical paraphernalia of theater—
scenery, costumes, and lighting—de-
spite the improvised nature of the
venues. It had to be a seductive, profes-
sional show. Almost at once Comune
was beset by the same internal quarrels
that had dogged Nuova Scena, and it
disbanded in 1973. In 1970, however,
the company did produce Accidental
Death of an Anarchist, Fo’s most suc-
cessful straight play.
In December 1969 a bomb in a Milan
bank killed seventeen people. The po-
lice arrested the anarchist Giuseppe
Pinelli, who died three nights later in a
fall from the window of the police sta-
tion. It soon emerged that Pinelli had
had nothing to do with the bomb. In
Fo’s play a mad impostor (obviously
Fo) convinces the dumb Milan police-
men that he is an inspector from Rome
who has come to help create some cred-
ible account of the anarchist’s death. In
scenes as bitter as they are wacky, Pi-
nelli’s interrogation is enacted over and
over. Since court hearings on the death
were proceeding as the play premiered,Dario Fo