DARIO FO

Political theater has become a kind of byword for bring theater, conceited theater, pedantic theater, mechanical theater, a non-enjoyable theater. Dario Fo, 1973

Name: Ridhi Sahani Course: B.A (hons) English III Year Paper Number:

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 Introduction 4-5 Childhood influence. 6 Political Influence and The Bourgeois Period . 7-8 Revolutionary Period.. 9 Dario Fo As An Artist. 10-11 Conclusion ... 12

Introduction

Dario Fo is Italy's most potent and well known literary figures, along with his partner and longtime collaborator, Franca Rame. He was born in San Giano , Italy ,24 March , 1926, the son of Felice (a railroad stationmaster) and Pina (Rota) Fo. Initially Fo considered a career in architecture, it before he had quite finished his course of study, he discover that he was far happier working in theatrical circles. Fo had decided on a career on the stage and began to compose prolifically. A consistency can be clearly marked while running throughout Fo's career. His plays are usually farcical with a satirical bite, and they and to employ popular elements, such as slapstick. There are also discernible stages in Fo's career. At first, he concentrated creating comical farces and revues, some of which was broadcast on radio. Then, Fo's plays began to resemble some typical dramas, at least in the sense that they became less episodic and less strictly comical in effect. Later, Fo's greater engagement with Italian politics in his plays became evident. Indeed, by the time of Morte accidentale di un anarchico (Accidental Death of an Anarchist), Fo was so deeply into Italian politics that he began gearing his plays towards workingclass audiences instead of more typical theatergoers. He continued to attract people of all social strata of his plays, yet he began to reflect, theatrically, his sense that his life as artist is best led in the service of those holding the least amount of social and political power in Italian society. Fo is highly influential figure in theatrical circles in and outside Italy. He has written hundred od pieces across genres (songs, plays, screenplays)and media (radio, stage, film). His plays , which number more than forty, include I sanida legare (A Madhouse for the sane, 1954)which characterizes certain governments officials as fascists sympathizers and Mistero buffo (1969) controversial improvisational play, based on the gospels, that disparages both church and state. L' Anomal bicefalo (Two- headed Anomaly), produced in Milan in 2003 but not published

or translated into English, is a scathing satire of Italy's Prime Minister, Silvio Berlesconi. Fo has always been an actor in his own work; indeed, he is well known as an actor as he is a writer. He has been arrested and put on trial for subversion, and he has been beaten up by rogue political foes. He is a presence to contend with, an artist whose influence and genius are reflected in his having been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1997.

Childhood influence

'I must thank my mother who chose to give birth at San Giano on Lake Maggiore . To be honest my mother didnt make the choice, State railways had decided to send my father to work at that station.(Fo;1988) San Giano is small town in Lombardy, near Swiss border, where his father wor ked as a stationmaster and his mother was a peasant. His father, Felice, had oc casionally worked in amateur drama productions and his mother, Pia Rota, c ame from a traditional oral storytellers. But the biggest influence on Fo's futur e career was his maternal grandfather Giuseppe;a kind of traveling green groc er who use to entertain his customers outrageous and scandalous stories. Also , Fo grew up around the place where a tradition called fabulatori (oral storytel ling of grotesque and paradoxical stories) was still followed strongly. He was, as well very intended to listen to the stories of the local fishermen, who told th e tales of towns at the bottom of the lake, where traditional roles reversal took place, such as women getting drunk in bars and priests confronting their sins. These influences stayed with him throughout and reflected in his works. What Fo observed at a very impressionable age was the art of storytelling, without t he use of theatrical cast and props.

Political Influence and the Bourgeois Period

The Second World War broke when Fo was about 14 years old and spent his adolescence around the war politics. His father had become military commander of the Resistance movement for his local area, while his mother gave medical assistance to wounded partisans. Although Fo had observed the left wing ideas of his father far more than the fascism of the regime, he never joined Resistance in any real sense. His father was on the wanted list, so was he for different reasons, so as he couldn't go back home he witnessed fascism and Nazi atrocities. After the war ended, Fo entered into architecture but didn't finish his course and found himself on the milieu of politics and cosmopolitan. It was during his discovery of this atmosphere that Fo started to take interest in theatre and after a while and after a while came under the influence three traditions: French farce, neo- realistic cinema, and the theatre of Eduardo De Filippo. Fo's first significant theatrical appearance was in a revue of 24 sketches, A Pok e in the Eye, which was first published in 1953. Fo once explained that with 'po ke in the eye'; ' The key was destroying the myths which fascism has imposed an d Christian Democrats had preserved. The myth of the hero, according to which only great people make history. The myth of the family and a certain kind of mor ality. Of culture as a product of an elite of intellectuals'. Even though it opened i n summers and the actors and writers were unknown, the show was an imme diate hit. There were several reasons for this: the scenography, the mime, Fos acting in particular and the political content. The second review show or the series of sketches opened in the following year (1954) and was called I sani da legare ( These Sane People Should Be Locked Up .) on this occasion the political targets were even clearer, more contemporary and familiar. Most of the sketches were set in the big city of the North, with its factories, hospitals, jails, police stations, trams and unemployment. Influential journalists were taken to task, as were the middle class women who organized charity for people alleviate their own boredom. After an absence of four years, Fo's next work was a series of four farces collec tively entitled Thieves, Shop Dummies and Naked Women. Another series of f our farces collectively named as Comic Finale, was produced after a few mont

hs. Fo's next success was a full length play, Archangels Don't Play Pinballs. Wit h his earlier plays the setting is working class Milan, although more specificall y the world of petty criminals. After focusing on humor in his previous plays, F o now reverted to more political stance. Fo somehow never got himself away f rom the working class politics happening around him. He captured every wor king class events happening in Milan and converted them into literary works. For example, He Had two Pistols and Black and White Eyes was based on the ex plosion of working class activity against the Tambroni government. Surpassing all the hardships and barricades, due to the censorship board and Communists parties, Fo and Rame presented their first Canzonissima which in cluded tramps criticizing the rich in Milan, criticism of General Nazis, and sarc astic comments about the television presenters. The span of years 1959 1968 was a period later tagged as Fo's 'bourgeois' peri od. Fo expresses in an age where censorship was rigidly enforced, thus the bo urgeois' tag remains appropriate. This stage of Fo's period has interestingly be en named as the ' blue period, when Fo and Rame performed with enormous success in the established theatre of the cities of Italy. Italy was experiencing i ts economical miracle and though Fo and Rame took a sufficiently jaundiced, s atirical view of developments in the country to probe the censor, their general stance were no more adversarial than is conventionally expected of Western writers today.

Revolutionary period
The year following the student revolt in 1968, the opposing of the Vietnam W ar provided the focus for the radicalization of a generation and a wider if impr ecise discontent with the tedium of affluence and materialism took hold of sec tions of youthful society. It was then when everything altered and the 'blue pe riod' of Fo was transformed into the ' red period'. For the self proclaimed revo lutionaries of those years, it seemed that a new civilization, to be crated in acc ordance with the teachings of Karl Marx, media tied by Herbert Marcuse, Anto nio Gramsci, and Jean Paul Sartre and tempered by Groucho Marx was in the making. In this climate, Fo by then indisputably the most successful play write in Italy, broke with the 'bourgeois theatre' to forge a new style of popular and to establish an alternative circuit of spaces far removed from established com mercial venues. It is in this arc of years that his best known plays belong. This is Fo the revolutionary, who attacked American involvement in Vietnam in pla ys such as the 1967 La signora da buttare ( Toss the Lady Out); who ridiculed the church, the army ,and big business in the 1968 pantomima on bandiere e p upazzi picoli e medi; who slammed the Italian Communist party for thir feeble compromise with capitalism in the 1969 Legami pure Che tanto io spacco tutto lo stesso; who mocked the church, if not christian belief, in the 1969 Mistero b uffo; who denounced the connivance between the police, politicians , and neo Fac sist terrorists in the 1970 Moret Accidentale ; who supported Palestinian milita nts in the 1971 Fedayn; who advocated what was then termed 'proletarian exp ropriation' and what lawyers call shoplifting in the 1974 Non si paga!; and wh o denounced the power of industrial bosses in works such as the 1981 Clascon , trombette e pernacci. It is not possible, in other words, to take the politics out of Fo or to present him as a mild liberal. Around 1977, the 'red' period of milit ant piazzas politics gave way for Fo and Rame to a 'rose' mood with All Bed, Bo ard and, Church, the first of a series of strongly feminist pieces. The highest recognition of his achievements came with the award in 1997 of t he Nobel Prize for Literature. The actor and playwright was recognized for havi ngin the tradition of medieval players castigated power and resorted dignity to the oppressed"(1997). The words highlight the dissonance between the poetic s and the politics, between the revolutionary and the traditionalist.

Dario Fo as an artist
Theatre in Fo's eyes, that is, comic theatre, satirical theater , the theater that fl ayed abuses with the severity Aristophanes, Plautus, Ruzzante had displayed, could perform a revolutionary function. When Fo chose to use theater for that end, he turned to a modern philosophy Marxism and to the theatrical devices of the past those used by giullare. He was simultaneously, and disconcertingly, an innovator and a reactionary. Fo combined past culture and future aspirations with his famous explanation of his change of direction in 1968. He was tired, he said, of being the 'giullare o f the bourgeois and wished to be the giullare of the proletarian'. The decision to turn away from 'bourgeois' to socailasi Thayer was justified, in other swords,b y reference to a figure from Italian theatrical history. The translation of the giu llare word is tricky. The giullare was a performer in medieval Europe, a one m an actor writer who played in the streets and piazzas. The word is linked with the English word 'juggler', but the giullare has more in common with the mins trel, the clown, the Shakespearean fool, and even the modern busker. In Fo's e yes, the giullare was the quintessentially popular entertainer who expressed i n satirical, comic from the feelings be they resentments, anger,joy or passionof ordinary people. The type of acting Fo advocates is a consequence of his storyteller's theater. H e has spoken, lectured, supervised, advised, and performed at numerous work shops and laboratories around the world on acting techniques, but his fundam ental belief was expressed in the course of the lessons he gave in the Teatro At eneo in Rome in 1986 " The great actors I have known do not perform but recou nt. In writing, the actor must find the story not the character. Characters exist in function of the story"(Fo 1986). For Fo, it was essential to see as well as listen, to enjoy the spectacle as much a s to hear ideas. Fo preference was for ' theatre of situation', in which situation is ' "the basic structure that allows the progress of the narrative to be constructe d in such a way as to involve the audience in the tension and make it participate fully in the unfolding of the plot" (1991:89). Situation is essential to farce, Fo's chosen genre. Fo's preference is invariably Fo those types of theater that was previously regarded as marginal clown shows, farce, acrobatic displays, pocha des, stand up comedy and mediaeval gesture routines provided they were imb

ued with satirical fire against the oppressive powers that be and not merely d ecorated with pricka and prods that allowed the authorities to appear to toler ate ridicule without risking anything. Fo's satire on those who wield power in society falls like a lash on a naked back yet arouses the hilarity of a clown on st ils. The combination of satire and farce has produced a wholly new style of the ater. The fact that Accidental Death Of an Anarchist is hilarious and traditional in form has sheltered people from recognizing his boldness in employing farc e to deal with the murder of an innocent man in police custody.

Conclusion
Fo is a treasure hunter. He pleads proudly guilty to charges of plagiarism and plunder from the scripts of his predecessors, but he has been fulsome in his pr aise of those from whom he has stolen or, in less sensational terms, learned. H e filched the of twins from Plautus for his works He hadTwo Pistols with Who te Nd Black Eyes Nd Clacson and, though more debatably, the inspiration for t he intrusion of a faux naf outsider in An accidental Death of an Anarchist from Gogol's government Inspector. Fo's professional activities encompass activities all aspects of theatrical produ ction. Besides being an accomplished playwright and performer , he is also a director, choreographer, set designer, costume designer, and song writer. By pursuing these various interest simultaneously, he caused an uproa r in the Italian theater community, which back in the 1960s was divided into s eparate professional associations :" Authors refuse to accept me as an author a nd actors refuse me to accept me as an actor. Authors say I am an actor trying to be an author, while actors say I am an author trying to be an actor. Nod obey w ants me in their camp. Only the set designers tolerate me" (1992:21)