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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.