The laughter is simply a means of making the audience confront the problem. - Dario Fo
She was the muse behind his creative work. Actress and playwright Franca Rame died in 2013, three years before the death of her husband Dario Fo. Both had loved, provoked, blasphemed and collaborated for much of the latter half of the 20th century, leaving a deep impact on contemporary drama. Their laughter blended with the tragic to make one take a critical pause, think and respond to a world that often escapes public attention.
The 1960s was the background to Fo’s militancy as he and his wife became part of the dissident fervour of the time, leading to his anarchic art, often regarded as sacrilegious by the Vatican. He supported the Communist Party, but eventually moved to the New Left when he found the former too authoritarian, inflexible and increasingly conservative. He formed La Commune, a militant theatre group in Milan, which passionately supported the Palestinian cause, helping political prisoners incarcerated in French jails. Fo’s every act of writing, of creating inflammatory art, was, in fact, a commitment to the idea of freedom.
The plays he wrote brought out radical reformist thoughts in areas of social justice, universal human rights and the rule of law — which became an act of survival and a motivating force behind his call for liberatory movements. The love of a life with a cause inspired him to donate his Nobel Prize money towards charity. A Madhouse for the Sane satirised contemporary Italian politics and fascism . His farce Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! humorously ridiculed the rich, using the story of working-class women rebelling against the rising cost of living and raiding the supermarket, underscoring issues of unemployment and social discrimination. According to Fo, the widespread belief in neo-liberalism uncharitably embraces the quest of self-interest under the auspices of the capitalist tyranny.
The subversion of the state, therefore, became his credo. This quality of Fo is on display in The Two-Headed Anomaly , a hilarious political spoof in which Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi come under attack during a political rally in Sicily. Putin dies and half his brain is given to Berlusconi whose wife then explains to him his transformed identity.
Another iconic example is his tragi-comedy Accidental Death of an Anarchist, based on the case of an Italian railroad worker pushed from the upper story of a Milan police station while being interrogated on charges of terrorism. Hitting out at the abuse and assault of the state machinery, Fo mocks the police and their eagerness to see a terrorist in everyone. This provoked such an angry response that in 1973, his wife was kidnapped and raped by fascists. But the couple never relented. In a post-9/11 comment, he further angered the conservatives: “Regardless of who carried out the massacre, this violence is the legitimate daughter of the culture of violence, hunger and inhumane exploitation.”
Living at a time when the rise of Christian bigotry has resulted in intolerance and the death of ideology, he wrote: “A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.” He knew that any attack on power incited extreme wrath, and any use of humour or burlesque became an irritant. His Mistero Buffo burlesqued politics and religion through a subversive retelling of the Christian gospel.
“I am the jongleur. I leap and pirouette, and make you laugh. I make fun of those in power, and I show you how puffed up and conceited are the big shots who go around making wars in which we are the ones who get slaughtered. I reveal them for what they are. I pull out the plug, and... pssss... they deflate.” This was Fo’s socialism, a trait he said we are all born with. Giving no credit to Marx, he resorted to the notion of being “born politicised.”
Fo’s barbed satire accompanied with his compulsive disposition for revolution, aspired for freedom from “conventional literary writing to express with words that you can chew, with unusual sounds, with various techniques of rhythm and breathing, even with the rambling nonsense-speech of the ‘grammelot’.” As the television presenter Pippo Baudo would say on his death, Fo created “a new way of doing theatre, a new language.”
The rigid compulsions of neoliberal right-wing beliefs within an orthodox tradition promote conflict-ridden agendas thereby damaging the idea of freedom. Intolerance to Fo is both retrogressive and unabashedly unconstitutional. As Stephen Dedalus declares in Joyce’s Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man : “The overriding prerequisite to becoming an artist is freedom, especially that from nationality, language and religion.” For Fo, as for Dante who dumped those “without praise or blame” in The Inferno , there is no room for intellectual neutrality or indifference in times of crisis.
Raising his voice against the culture of intolerance and fear that has overtaken Europe, he emphasised: “Even before Europe was united in an economic level or was conceived at the level of economic interests and trade, it was culture that united all the countries of Europe. The arts, literature, music are the connecting link of Europe.” He thus advocated a transcultural, borderless world where it is vital “that we remain completely open, that we are always involved, and that we aim to contribute personally in social events.” Incidentally, we in India have much to learn from him at the present juncture of breaking cultural ties with Pakistan.
In an environment of self-righteousness and complacency, we cannot permit the state to overreach itself in the harsh eloquence of self-defence and national honour. To realise this vision, the wide chasm between the private and public intellectual has to be bridged. This was Dario Fo’s belief till the end. And as Franca Rame wrote, she never heard her husband say ‘let’s give up’.
Shelley Walia is professor and fellow, Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh.
