Paula Bohince
Poem
Fo changed the script almost daily to include material from the trial, much of it as grotesque and surreal as his original imaginings. The play led to forty legal actions against him.
It is with a sense of wonder that one follows Farrell’s detailed account of these years—wonder that Fo and Rame survived, wonder that they survived as a couple. Fo was a whirlwind of creativity throwing up turbulence all around. Their house was set on fire. Franca was abducted and raped by extremist thugs hired, as it later turned out, by the police. The couple went on producing plays in which they pretended to spray machine-gun fire at the audience or had actors dressed as police burst into the theater and announce that everyone was under arrest. They visited Mao’s China and declared it the perfect society. For years they occupied an abandoned building in central Milan, turning it into a theater and left-wing community. Shown on public television in 1977, Mistero buffo provoked fierce national controversy.
Dario had endless affairs with young actresses. Franca announced she was leaving him in a live TV interview. He wrote letters of apology and reconciliation that reached her when they were published in a newspaper. It was as if a life were not real if it didn’t happen in public. He began to concede her importance and coauthorship of their work. She began to perform monologues of her own on feminist issues. All this while a constant stream of shows was produced, often on controversial questions—Palestine, Chile, drug dealing— about which Fo knew very little. “Years lived at high speed,” Rame later observed. She died in 2013, and Fo in 2016. What one is invited to consider here is the notion of artists whose work mattered supremely at the moment and in the place it was first performed, and depended largely on the physical presence of the artists themselves. Directors around the world have produced Fo’s work; the British version of Accidental Death of an Anarchist is a rare example of successful adaptation. But the sheer electricity and brazen provocation of Fo’s original performance is hard to recover, even in Italy. Fo, Farrell claims, “was the least autobiographical of writers.” But arguably the plays themselves, his performance of them, were the life, and the marriage. The stage settings were his. He designed and often painted the props. He wrote the songs. He performed himself, directed himself. Rame advised, assisted, edited. Browsing the scores of videos available online, it’s hard not to feel that Fo is happiest with an adoring audience of young people cross-legged on the floor all around while he performs the monstrous Boniface puffing himself up in papal splendor. But however enthusiastic the audience might be about the moral message behind the material, it does not seem that any transformative anger is aroused, or any compassion for the pope’s victims, nailed by their tongues to church doors. One is simply agog at the extraordinary virtuosity that is Dario Fo. n