Download An interview with Dario Fo POPULAR AND POLITICAL THEATRE

POPULAR
AND POLITICAL
THEATRE
An interview with
Dario Fo
In this country, Dario Fo is best known
for his plays on contemporary politics
(Can't Pay, Won't Pay and Accidental
Death of an Anarchist). In Italy he is
equally well known for his one-person
shows, whose roots go far back into the
history of the theatre. Whatever the
nature of the plays staged by the
company formed by him and his companion Franca Rame, they pull in mass
audiences from the Left and from
workers in the city and countryside. Here
he talks to Derek Boothman.
Democrats. Then, in the early 1960s, they
hired Franca and me to do a series of TV
shows since we were having a successful run
at the box office and they wanted to show
their modern approach to cultural affairs.
This was alongside a similar attempt in
politics where they'd just brought the
socialists into government for the first time
ever. But they hadn't bargained with us
talking about themes that were taboo, such
as the condition of the real workers or the
mafia, so they started censoring not just the
odd word but whole texts. We walked out,
which completely stunned them because
they couldn't conceive of anyone flatly
rejecting a share in power; it was 14 years
before we next appeared on television.
However, our stance opened up the
possibility of reaching another type of
audience: an oppositional audience, not
solely in formal terms but opposed to the
system itself. It was this audience that we
gave a voice to.
Who were the people who came to your
'alternative' theatre?
The alternative circuit we created consisted
of workers and peasant proprietors and, of
Dario, one of your first conflicts with authoritycourse, students too — with the rise in
consciousness among students from the late
came when together with your comrade Franca
Rame you found yourself banned from 60s, these students were changing, becoming proletarianised and no longer just an
television. Why did this come about?
elite.
Well, Italian state television had always
been in the hands of the Christian And your aims?
We no longer wanted to provide a key for
the solution of old arguments — we wanted
to immerse ourselves in the movement,
respond to the needs that were emerging
and become the loud-speaker of the
movement, to open up a real dialogue. We
dealt with arguments which we didn't even
know existed before about 1970: themes
like piece-work, home-work, time and
motion in the factories, aggression, the
school system, working class resistance, the
resistance of popular culture. This is how
the piece I've been doing in London,
Mistero Buffo (a Queer or Comical Mystery)
was born, as were others like Ci ragiono e
canto (I reason and I Sing) or The Worker
Gavin Muir as the Constable from Belt &
Braces TV production of Accidental Death of an
Anarchist.
Dario Fo running a workshop for actors at the
Riverside Studios, London, in May this year.
Knows 300 Words, the Boss 1,000 — That's
Why He's the Boss, and then the internationalist themes like the Palestinian
Fedayeen, Greece, Chile, Spain and so on.
culture are just two sides of the same coin.
When we're working on these old genuinely
popular texts, which by themselves seem to
say or mean anything at all, we fill them
with a meaning that has relevance for our
own times. You have to give them a
meaning and rhythm so that people can
actually understand them. In order to do
this, you have to go very deeply into the
original vehicle itself. Then you use the
language of today (techniques borrowed
from the silent film, the cinema in general,
television, comic strips) and you put in
your own rhythms and formats — the
theatrical consciousness of our own culture, so as to bring them up to our times.
When you do this, you find that a piece like
Mistero Buffo is well received everywhere:
as well as in all parts of Italy, it's gone down
well in Spain, Greece, China, Yugoslavia,
Germany — places where they don't
understand the type of Italian language I
use.
In this country, up to now you've been best
known for your directly political plays — like
Accidental Death of an Anarchist, dealing
with the attempt to frame the anarchist Pinelli
on a murder-bombing charge and the
subsequent murder while in police custody. But
it seems to me there's another side to your
work, represented by the Mistero Buffo, in
which you're trying to re-establish popular
culture.
The whole of what I do is bound up with
this re-establishment of popular culture.
For example in the use of farce, in a play
about Agnelli, the head of the Fiat empire,
I introduce a worker who is Agnelli's
double. Now this is a device that goes back
through the Roman playwright Plautus to
the Greeks. Then in the piece / reason and I
sing, we used sixteen different singers;
workers who'd never been on stage in their
lives before, people who, however, had the
sense of these songs of the people deep
down inside themselves. Here my theatrical research links up with that of workers in
other fields, like musicology, and in fact the
whole of the advanced musical world,
including avant garde composers like
Luciano Berio and Luigi Nono (who are
. both associated with the Left) took an
interest in what we were doing.
The pieces dealing with present day
politics and the others based on popular
Canyou say something about why your theatre
translates so well? The use of your wordless
language and the role of the introduction you
do to each piece, for example.
As with other aspects of the technique I
use, the wordless language, the so-called
'grammelot' goes back a long time, to the
fifteenth century in fact, and was invented
as a way of getting round the censorship.
It's a 'language' in which maybe only one
word in ten, perhaps even fewer, is
recognisable as being a 'real' word — for the
rest I use mime, onomatopoeia and so'on.
Apart from my Italian grammelot, I've also
used French and American ones, as you've
seen here in London. For the American
one, I've listened to lecture upon lecture of
visiting Americans to get their intonation so
that I can then give a lecture myself as an
American technocrat; I imitate other things
like the sound of mission control, the
replies they get, the sound of machines that
won't start, the technocrat trying to put
them right and then spluttering himself like
his own machines. Everybody understands
it, though there was one time when some
Americans walked out because they
couldn't really understand it but they
thought I was making fun of America.
As for the introductions I do, well I'm
really only going back to the prologue you
know — something that was taken out in
the nineteenth century theatre. Sometimes
with a prologue, as in Shakespeare's Henry
V, you in the audience are told exactly what
will happen, so even there the coup de
theatre in the sense of the surprise element
is already out. The introduction serves as a
pretext to say things that are not directly
part of the story. So when I do my piece
about a Genoese banker instructing his son
in the ways of power — how to walk, when
not to use violence but to use the courts of
law etc — the audience understands
through what I've already said in my
'prologue' that it's not only or even
predominantly about Genoese bankers, but
it's for example about the arrogant power of
Thatcher, about national pride, about
creating nationalist feeling, about the
uselessness of that war in the Falklands. It
is also a warm-up for the audience. . . .
Yes, in fact, the analogy that springs to my
mind is that with some of the old-style
music-hall comedians here, one of whom —
Max Wall — is now playing Beckett. . . .
Indeed, things like this do lie at the root of
the theatrical experience. You know, in a
show that 'officially' lasts three hours, I
may only do twenty five minutes of the
pieces themselves, the rest is just my
commentary-introduction.
In the pieces you put together to make up the
Mistero Buffo,you're attacking'establishment
religion', the popes, their power, sometimes
their corruption, but it's not an anti-clerial
attack on religion as such. . . .
It's not directed against 'religiosity', the
religious sentiments of the people, as such.
It's not a question of disowning everything
bound up with mystery. You have to weigh
things up. You can't say 'I'm not interested
in the miracle of nature, in the magic of
things themselves, intuition, the passage of
one season into another, the complex things
that we are, that other people are'. Now
that's the religiosity of the people, a
religiosity that has always existed, pantheistic, bound up with religiosity in respect of
the sun, the stars, the earth. It has very
deep roots, and when I put on a show in
front of a peasant audience, there's
absolutely no one who grumbles 'Oh, he's
talking about religion again'. That complaint always comes from the crudely
schematic, stupid intellectual, including
Marxists and communists. They're scared
stiff of religiosity connected with things like
the seasons, love, time, rites. Most of all
they're afraid of rites, then at a certain time
you discover that everything is a rite;
obviously here I'm exaggerating in the
opposite direction.
That's your criticism of this type of intellectual. But I'd also like to know how you
characterise the Italian Communist Party
(PCI) in this, not so much for its overall
political line — the 'historic compromise'
period and now the 'democratic and left
alternative' that ifs proposing — but more the
cultural policy of the party and the left?
It's closely bound up with what I've been
saying. There's a great, yawning gap in the
PCI's cultural policy that stems from a
certain trap, a misunderstanding that
Gramsci, too, fell into. It consists in saying
that given the culture of the dominant
classes, it's not even worthwhile enquiring
into the nature of any other culture since
we know it's a subordinate, subaltern one.
Above all there's the idea that everything
the people has created, it has done as a
slavish copy of the noble and aristocratic
standards of the big bourgeoisie, the
intelligent big bourgeoisie naturally. Popular culture has always been overshadowed
for the Communists by high culture — why
bother about de-husking millet if there's
excellent wheat (Renaissance and later high
cutlure) around? This lack of interest is
also linked both to the positivists in Italian
thought and to the Crocean idealists.
Croce, cunning fox that he was, said that
popular culture didn't exist, that it wasn't
worth anything, that it lacked the essential
depth of poetry. The communists too
accepted this interpretation.
It's not by chance that research into
popular culture was carried out by
socialists, rather than communists; in
particular, someone like Ernesto De
Martino, a somewhat strange socialist who
did research into the popular catholic world
and not into the popular culture of the
Marxist world. But a lot of these
researchers looked at things in terms of
mere copies of what ought to have been
there; they did a mechanical study of what
they considered the core of the work ought
to be, without bothering to carry out the
work of transformation in order to make
these pieces live again. It's rather like
finding some old relic, seeing what state of
preservation it's in, and it's always done
with a sort of detached view as if you're
dealing with dead objects.
When I do this type of research, I try to
make the pieces live again. I put mystery
back into them, but I start by digging down
right into them to get to the heart, then I fill
in the holes. I do a work of restoration if
you like. According to some theories of
restoration, you have to be very attentive to
the text; with mine, it may be that nothing
of the original is there at the end. For me
it's a question of changing the text, and I've
got to say that the Communist Party hasn't
understood anything of this.
Why is there, in your opinion, this neglect or
refusal to accept popular culture?
It comes from the fear of not being a
nation, a nation according to the canons of
old-style, vetero-Marxism (remember that
Italy was unified as late as the latter part of
last century). Instead of one national
culture, there existed lots of regional ones.
But what this type of Marxism overlooks is
that at one of the great moments in our
history — the Renaissance — there were
about ten different languages in existance in
the peninsula, different conflicts, different
hegemonies. The nation for that type of
Marxism was the sense of a nation as it
existed in nineteenth century Europe, but
we've never been this. Take the example of
our greatest writers. Pirandello's theatre is
in Sicilian dialect and Manzoni (author of
The Betrothed, the most famous Italian
novel) wrote in a Milanese dialect, a dialect
(like
the
mixture
of Lombard,
Piedmontese and Venetian that I've
concocted for my 'Northern Italian') which
has never existed. He invented a fake,
maybe a supercharged one, but a fake
nonetheless. Now, people are begining to
rediscover dialect, people like Tullio de
Mauro (a linguist of some prestige in the
general Italian cultural world and
associated with the Communist Party) and
they're discovering that the whole of Italian
theatre is dialect theatre.