Dario Fo 1926 – 2016

[marylander1940]

Dario Fo, Whose Plays Won Praise, Scorn and a Nobel, Dies at 90

 

Dario Fo, the Italian playwright, director and performer whose scathingly satirical work earned him both praise and condemnation, as well as the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature, died on Thursday in Milan. He was 90.

 

His death was confirmed by his Italian publisher, Chiarelettere.

 

Mr. Fo wrote more than 80 plays, many of them in collaboration with his wife, Franca Rame, who died in 2013, and his work was translated into about 30 languages.

 

He was best known for “Accidental Death of an Anarchist” (1970), a play based on the case of an Italian railroad worker who was either thrown or fell from the upper story of a Milan police station while being questioned on suspicion of terrorism, and for his one-man show “Mistero Buffo” (“Comic Mystery”), written in 1969 and frequently revised and updated over the next 30 years, taking wild comic aim at politics and, especially, religion.

 

After a 1977 version of “Mistero Buffo” was broadcast in Italy, the Vatican denounced it as “the most blasphemous show in the history of television.”

The church’s attitude toward Mr. Fo had not mellowed a generation later, when he was awarded the Nobel. “Giving the prize to someone who is also the author of questionable works is beyond imagination,” the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano said.

 

Many critics felt differently. “Imagine a cross between Bertolt Brecht and Lenny Bruce and you may begin to have an idea of the scope of Fo’s anarchic art,” Mel Gussow wrote in The New York Times in 1983.

 

Basing their art on the tradition of the medieval jester and the improvisation techniques of commedia dell’arte, Mr. Fo and Ms. Rame thrilled, dismayed and angered audiences around the world. Together they staged thousands of performances, in conventional theaters, factories occupied by striking workers, university sit-ins, city parks, prisons and even deconsecrated churches.

 

“We’ve had to endure abuse, assaults by the police, insults from the right-thinking and violence,” Mr. Fo said in his Nobel lecture.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/arts/international/dario-fo-playwright-nobel-literature.html?_r=0

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dario_Fo