Dario Fo: a master storyteller and fearlessly critical artist

Satire was always dangerous in the long career of Dario Fo, the Italian actor, director and dramatist who has died in Milan at the age of 90, and whose expansive work earned him as many tributes as adversities.

A theatre artist who combined savage political comment with scabrous humour, Fo took tough pride in those extreme responses. “It is hard for power to enjoy or incorporate humour and satire in its system of control,” he once said, and both Fo and his family experienced the full extent of that displeasure.

Born in the small village of Leggiuno in Northern Italy and originally a student of Fine Art in Milan before he turned to theatre, Fo's social and political satire first brought him fame and popular acclaim, later censure from the Vatican for blasphemy, admission and expulsion from the Italian Communist Party, and innumerable incidences of harassment and intimidation.

It also secured him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997, and the enduring respect of political artists, comedians and audiences.

A master storyteller, Fo excelled early in mime and improvisation, first working as an actor for numerous companies and later directing his own plays. Between his first work, Corpse for Sale, in 1958 and his last, There's a Mad King in Denmark, in 2015 he would write almost 50.

Stinging satire

With his wife, Franca Rame, who came from a family of popular entertainers, he founded a company, first performing amiable farces to entertain bourgeois audiences, but by the mid-1960s his intention was to make stinging satirical pieces to engage the working class.

The political disturbances of 1968 and Fo’s admiration for “illegitimate” forms of theatre, such as the vagabond lampooners of commedia dell’arte, would move him away from mainstream theatre and supply him with ample material and methods. “I was born politicised,” Fo said.

The radical content of his work grew to include sharp attacks at capitalism, imperialism and the scandals of the Italian government. Though Fo’s social criticism became more subtle in later years, it made both he and Rame the victims of horrendous intimidation, including imprisonment, physical attacks, rape and attempts on their lives.

They continued their work undaunted, leaning towards the didacticism of Brecht, yet staying resolutely and courageously funny.

Absurd

Fo's own formulation of satire was to inject a few drops of the absurd into reality. It was something that his widely and wildly celebrated improvisational one-man performance, Mistero Buffo, achieved by using popular sketches to criticise landowners, the Catholic Church and the government as oppressors of the working class. When it was broadcast, in 1977, the Vatican deemed it "the most blasphemous show in the history of television".

Widely translated, Fo’s best known works in the English-speaking world are Accidental Death of an Anarchist and Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! The first, from 1970, deals with a cover-up by Italian police for the death of Giuseppi Pinelli, a railway worker implicated in a bombing in 1969 – its performance brought Fo and Rame their worst intimidations. The second, a political farce about a consumer backlash against high prices, remains influential and is frequently revived.

The Nobel Prize legitimised Fo’s work, which, though considered dangerous, had often been dismissed as clowning, or criticised for putting political commitment ahead of theatrical needs.

Fo, who was predeceased by Rame in 2013, was never likely to settle into a quiet retirement. His Nobel Prize acceptance speech referenced a 13th Century law allowing jesters to be put to death, and as recently as 2013, when he was still criticising the Italian President Silvio Berlusconi and railing against the effect of the global financial crisis, he once again exalted the position of subversive and distrusted artists.

A new diaspora of artists expelled by powerful forces, he ventured, would “doubtlessly draw unimaginable benefits for the sake of a new representation.” Such were the politics of a restlessly, and fearlessly, critical artist.