Obituary
62 THE ART NEWSPAPER Number 284, November 2016
Dario Fo
The life and death of an ideological jester, whose plays lampooned inequality and corruption
“
W
hat is the
theatre of
Fo if not
a political
message
disguised,
encoded,
hidden
beneath a great satirical talent?” So asked the
Italian critic Cesare Garboli when Dario Fo
was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in- Art and activism—and the consequent
controversy and censorship—are inseparable in
the biography of the playwright, who died, aged
90, on 13 October.
Born in Lombardy, Italy, to a modest family
and blessed with the gift of curiosity, Fo studied
at Milan’s fine arts academy, the Accademia
di Brera. In the early 1950s he began to write
satire for state television and, with Franca Rame,
whom he married in 1954, to stage plays inspired
by popular comic traditions. Fo’s satirical brio
also found a voice in a continuous stream of
set designs, costumes, puppets, drawings and
paintings, to which the Palazzo Reale in Milan
dedicated a major exhibition in 2012.
Fluent in grammelot
As a playwright, director and actor—for years
he was Italy’s most renowned theatre writer—
Fo revived the role of Medieval jester. Mistero
bufo (Comical mystery) (1969), a reworking of
historical texts from the Po valley threaded with
allusions to the present, is the masterpiece that
best epitomises his theatre. His study of popular
culture taught him to question the distinctions
between high and low, comedy and tragedy, and
to trust in the expressiveness of other languages.
He popularised “grammelot”, a gibberish
Graham C. Greene, the former managing
director of the publishing house Jonathan
Cape, and a long-serving trustee of the
British Museum, died on 10 October, aged- A nephew of the famous novelist (he
used his middle initial to avoid confusion),
he was educated at Eton and University
College, Oxford. He worked for the publisher
Secker & Warburg from 1958 before moving
to Jonathan Cape in 1962. In 1989 the
business was sold to Random House and
Greene retired from publishing. He was
made a trustee of the British Museum in
1978, sitting on the board for 24 years. As
chairman, he was closely involved in building
the Norman Foster-designed Great Court,
for which, with fellow trustee Claus Moser,
he helped raise £110m. He was, however,
hurt by widespread criticism when a builder
used incorrect stone for the south portico. He
also incurred the wrath of the Department
of Culture, Media and Sport for refusing to
introduce admission charges.
Alison Kelly, the art historian and Coade
stone expert, died on 15 August, aged 102.
Kelly read English at Lady Margaret Hall,
Oxford, and spent a year at the Liverpool
City School of Art. She then took up stage
design at the Westminster Theatre and
during the Second World War helped
technicians to create camoulage. She
subsequently lectured on ceramics, and
published books on Wedgwood. She spent
17 years researching Coade stone. A mixture
of crushed lint, quartz, soda-lime glass and
clay, the material was cheaper than natural
stone and was used to make architectural
members, statuary and ornaments that
retained their deinition and did not weather
or oxidise. It was used on many buildings
in England, including St George’s Chapel,
Windsor, the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, the
Royal Naval College, Greenwich, Carlton
House and Buckingham Palace. In 1990, she
published Mrs Coade’s Stone, the deinitive
account of the subject.Norman Palmer, an emeritus professor
of the law of art and cultural property at
University College London (UCL), and the
principal academic adviser to the Institute
of Art and Law, died on 3 October, aged 68.
Palmer was called to the Bar in 1973 and held
law professorships at a succession of English
universities: Reading, Essex, Southampton
and inally UCL. In 1994, he married Ruth
Redmond Cooper who, a year later, founded
the Institute of Art and Law. Palmer became
its academic adviser the following year. His
expertise was the law relating to cultural
property and other forms of portable wealth.
He was an adviser to the UK government
on policy and legislation—he was on the
ministerial panel on the illicit trade in cultural
objects, 2000-05—and to international
organisations on making coherent legal
agreements, drafting legislation on
acquisitions, loans and the sharing of cultural
objects, and dispute settlement. He was the
author of The Recovery of Stolen Art (1998)
and Museums and the Holocaust (2000).Raine, Countess Spencer, the
stepmother of Diana, Princess of Wales,
and the chatelaine of Althorp, died on
21 October, aged 87. Her father Alexander
McCorquodale and her mother Barbara
Cartland divorced when she was four. She
was active in politics, with special interests
in heritage and the environment. She was
elected to Westminster Council in 1954
and to London County Council (LCC) in- When the LCC was replaced by the
Greater London Council in the Sixties, she
was for six years directly involved in town
planning and historic buildings. Between
1971 and 1972 she was the chair of the
Covent Garden development committee
that prevented the razing of the structures
in the piazza to make way for high-rise oice
buildings. After marrying Earl Spencer in
1976 she undertook the restoration of the
17th-century Northamptonshire family seat,
Althorp, a project that alienated her four
stepchildren, although she and Princess
Diana were later reconciled.
Fo spent his life
whipping up jolly
storms, claiming
“freedom of opinion
and happiness of
existence through rage
and laughter”
FO: © GLOBE PHOTOS/ZUMAPRESS.COM/ALAMYInluential satirist: the biting humour of Fo’s political theatre helped to make him one of the modern world’s most performed contemporary playwrightsIn Memoriam
of inarticulate sounds that, he said, are “so
onomatopoeic and allusive in their cadences and
inflections as to allow you to grasp the meaning
of the whole”.
Fo often grappled with censorship and, in
the 1970s, raised the level of protest in his work,
staging his plays in alternative spaces outside the
oicial theatre circuits. It was not a good decade
for Italy, nor the Fo-Rame company. It became
public knowledge that the left-leaning Fo had
enlisted in the army of Mussolini’s Salo Republic
in 1943. And in 1973, in the middle of Italy’s
“Years of Lead”, Rame was kidnapped and raped
by five far-right militants.
Fo would confess to having joined Mussolini’s
ill-fated final adventure out of fear, but in that,
as in his subsequent activism, there was but one
motive: rebellion. Fo’s aversion to the system saw
him consistently defend opinions that were anti-
capitalist and hostile to the West. In recent years,
he supported the Five Star Movement founded
by the comedian Beppe Grillo. He assumed no
shortage of controversial positions, such as his
declaration that 9/11 was not an al-Qaeda attack
but the outcome of a US government conspiracy.It was Fo’s fate, or rather his role, to be
divisive, as the stir caused by his 1997 Nobel prize
demonstrated. Even Fo’s kind colleague Carmelo
Bene, the avant-garde writer and director, called
the award absurd. The Italian political Right
cried scandal while the Vatican newspaper the
Osservatore Romano deplored the “cultural
blasphemy”. Yet the Spanish writer Manuel
Vázquez Montalbán, cheered the consecration of
an anarchist, while Umberto Eco took pleasure
in a prize that delivered a slap in the face to the
academic world’s conventions and presumptions.
If we take the long view, though, it is clear that
Fo’s work places him in a tradition alongside
Teofilo Folengo, Ruzzante, Pietro Aretino and
all the other nonconformists and marginals
since the 16th century who embody the vital,
unpredictable impulse in Italian literature.
Howling at hypocrisy
Fo spent his life whipping up jolly storms,
claiming “freedom of opinion and happiness
of existence through rage and laughter” (La
Repubblica, 12 October 1997). And who knows—
he may well be laughing now, having succeeded,
even after death, in unmasking the classic
Italian vice of hypocrisy. I write this as a native
of a bizarre country, where high culture never
deigns to laugh; and yet it is funny to reread the
anti-Nobel award fulminations of Milan’s city
oicials: “Stay a jester: Milan doesn’t owe you
a celebration” (La Repubblica, 14 October 1997).
Just weeks ago, the same city, proclaiming its
civic grief, bestowed on the fool-ideologist a
funeral service on the parvis of the Duomo and a
farewell spectacle broadcast live on national TV:
how comic the mysteries of Italy!
Alessandra Runo- Dario Fo, born 24 March 1926, died 13 October 2016