Playwright’s mockery landed him Nobel Prize
Italian playwright Dario Fo, whose energetic mocking of Italian political life, social mores and religion won him the Nobel Prize for Literature, died Oct. 13. He was 90.
Fo died in Milan’s Luigi Sacco hospital, spokeswoman Ida Mannelli told The Associated Press.
Premier Matteo Renzi said with Fo’s death, Italy had lost one of the leading protagonists of Italian culture and civil life.
“His satire, research, scenography and artistic activity will leave the inheritance of a great Italian to the world,” Renzi said.
The author of Accidental Death of an Anarchist and more than 70 other plays saw himself as playing the role of the jester, combining raunchy humour and scathing satire. He was admired and reviled in equal measure.
His political activities saw him banned from the United States and censored on Italian television, and his flamboyant artistic antics resulted in repeated arrests.
In recent years, Fo became a point of reference for Italy’s anti-establishment 5-Star Movement, which eulogized him as a “spiritual guide.”
Born March 24, 1926 in Sangiano, Italy, the son of a railway worker and a farm hand, Fo had an early introduction to narrative traditions through his grandfather, a well-known storyteller. He studied painting at Milan’s prestigious Brera Academy as well as architecture, and at age 25, he began to write and perform satirical cabarets at the Piccolo Theater in Milan.
A staunch leftist, Fo founded a theatre company with his wife, the late actress Franca Rame, later a senator. Rame died in 2013 at the age of 84.
The pair made a career out of mocking postwar Italy, ranging from the domestic terrorism of the late 1970s to the bitter debates over abortion and divorce and the political corruption scandal in the early 1990s that brought down politicians and businessmen.
Dealing with subjects including the Vietnam War, the Chinese revolution and student revolts in the West, Fo and Rame took their works out of “bourgeois” theatres and into streets, piazzas, occupied factories and circus-style tents.
The one-man show was seen by an estimated one million people when it toured Italy over 18 months in 1968-1970.
As his work grew more and more radical, Fo fell out of favour with state TV RAI, which banned him for more than decade.
Some believed that right-wing sympathizers among the police were behind the kidnapping and rape of Fo’s wife by Italian neofascists in Milan in 1973, when the country’s society was largely rent between extreme right and left.
Accidental Death of an Anarchist, drew from an event that continues to divide Italians, who are often bitterly split between left and right in a stubborn legacy of the ideological and battles between fascist stalwarts and communist partisans during the second World War. The play is based on the fall from a police station window of an anarchist who was being questioned over a 1969 Milan bank bombing. The police officer who led the interrogation was fatally gunned down in 1972.
The Nobel Prize for literature came in 1997. The citation described Fo as a writer “who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden.”