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Dan Rebellato

  • News
  • Spilled Ink
  • Plays
    • Complete List of Plays
    • 7 Ghosts
    • Cavalry
    • Chekhov in Hell
    • Dead Souls
    • Emily Rising
    • Here's What I Did With My Body One Day
    • Killer
    • Mile End
    • Negative Signs of Progress
    • My Life Is a Series of People Saying Goodbye
    • Restless Dreams
    • Slow Air
    • Slow Beasts
    • Static
    • Theatremorphosis
    • You & Me
    • Zola: Blood, Sex & Money
  • Books, etc.
    • Complete List of Publications
    • 1956 and All That
    • Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945
    • Contemporary European Playwrights
    • Contemporary European Theatre Directors
    • Modern British Playwriting 2000-2009
    • No Theatre Guild Attraction Are We
    • On Churchill's Influences
    • Paris Commune
    • Playwriting
    • Sarah Kane before Blasted
    • Sarah Kane Documentary
    • The Suspect Culture Book
    • Theatre &
    • Theatre & Globalization
    • When We Talk of Horses
    • Writ Large
  • Stage Directions
  • Wilding Audio
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Dario Fo

So Dario Fo has died. He is one of the giants of European theatre in the twentieth century, a standing counter to any of the boring arguments that political theatre is worthily dull and just preaches to the converted. Dario Fo reached an absolutely vast popular audience with his extraordinary mixture of farce, mime, comedy, and revolutionary politics. He played sports arena; he got an audience of 20 million on TV; he was excoriated by the Vatican, undermined by the right-wing secret police, adored by millions; he shocked Italy's stuffy literary culture all over again in 1997 by winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was a performer and a playwright and the two were indissociable; he wrote his best plays by performing them.

I was asked to go on Radio 4's Last Word to talk about him. Me and Griff Rhys-Jones (who starred in Trumpets and Raspberries (1984) [Clacson, trombette e pernacchi, 1981]. It came out quite well, except please ignore my fumbled suggestion that Fo did not want to put himself in the tradition of Molière. Of course he did. But anywayyou can listen to it here.

And if that whets your appetite, click the video at the top to watch the first half of his fantastic performance, 'Pope Boniface VIII'. It's in Italian, but you'll understand it. Boniface was a thirteent-century pope, viciously corrupt and violent, hated by many, including Dante who in Inferno put him in hell before he'd even died. In this scene, Boniface is getting dressed in his papal regalia, bullying his altar boys. In the second half of the scene, Christ returns, and Boniface quickly but feebly tries to divest himself of his finery to curry favour with him.

October 16, 2016 by Dan Rebellato.
  • October 16, 2016
  • Dan Rebellato
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Dan Rebellato

playwright, teacher, academic

 

You may be here because you’ve come across a book, or play, or article of mine and you want to know more. Maybe you’re a student or a colleague or a friend or an acquaintance and you want to find out more about me. Maybe you are gathering ammunition for a vicious ad hominem attack that will expose me for the charlatan that I am.  

If so, you’ve come to the right place. Feel free to get in touch.

  • News
  • Spilled Ink
    • Complete List of Plays
    • 7 Ghosts
    • Cavalry
    • Chekhov in Hell
    • Dead Souls
    • Emily Rising
    • Here's What I Did With My Body One Day
    • Killer
    • Mile End
    • Negative Signs of Progress
    • My Life Is a Series of People Saying Goodbye
    • Restless Dreams
    • Slow Air
    • Slow Beasts
    • Static
    • Theatremorphosis
    • You & Me
    • Zola: Blood, Sex & Money
    • Complete List of Publications
    • 1956 and All That
    • Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945
    • Contemporary European Playwrights
    • Contemporary European Theatre Directors
    • Modern British Playwriting 2000-2009
    • No Theatre Guild Attraction Are We
    • On Churchill's Influences
    • Paris Commune
    • Playwriting
    • Sarah Kane before Blasted
    • Sarah Kane Documentary
    • The Suspect Culture Book
    • Theatre &
    • Theatre & Globalization
    • When We Talk of Horses
    • Writ Large
  • Stage Directions
  • Wilding Audio
  • Links
  • About
  • Contact

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