Dario Fo

Stage, Text, and Tradition

Edited by Joseph Farrell and Antonio Scuderi

November 2000

ISBN 0-8093-2335-4 | cloth | $39.95s

208 pages | 10 illustrations | 6 x 9

Theater, Performance Studies

Joseph Farrell and Antonio Scuderi present an international collection of essays reevaluating the multifaceted performance art of Nobel laureate Dario Fo.

The contributors, all of whom either have previously published on Fo or have worked with him, are the major Dario Fo scholars of three continents. Going beyond the Marxist criticism of the 1970s and 1980s, the editors and contributors try to establish an appropriate language in which to debate Fo’s theater. They seek to identify the core of Fo’s work, the material that will be of lasting value. This involves locating Fo in history, examining the nature of his development through successive phases, incorporating his politics into a wider framework of radical dissent, and setting his theatrical achievements in a context and a tradition.

The essays cover every aspect of Dario Fo: as actor, playwright, performer, and songwriter. They also provide the historical background of Fo’s theater, as well as an in-depth analyses of specific works and the contribution of Franca Rame.

Joseph Farrell is a senior lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland. He is the winner of the John Florio Prize for his translation from Italian of Take-off by Daniele del Guidice.

Antonio Scuderi is an assistant professor in the Division of Language and Literature at Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri. He is the author of Dario Fo and Popular Performance and The Dialect Poetry of Nino Martoglio: Sociolinguistic Issues in a Literary Context.

Contents & Contributors

• Joseph Farrell and Antonio Scuderi, Introduction: The Poetics of Dario Fo

• Walter Valeri, An Actor’s Theater

• Ron Jenkins, The Rhythms of Resurrection: On Stage with Fo

• Antonio Scuderi, Updating Antiquity

• Costantino Maeder, Mistero buffo: Negating Textual Certainty, the Individual, and Time

• Joseph Farrell, Fo and Ruzzante: Debts and Obligations

• Tony Mitchell, “The Moon Is a Light Bulb” and Other Stories: Fo, the Songwriter

• Bent Holm, Dario Fo’s “Bourgeois Period”: Carnival and Criticism

• Jennifer Lorch, Morte accidentale in English

• Sharon Wood, Parliamo di donne: Feminism and Politics in the Theater of Franca Rame

• Paolo Puppa, Tradition, Traditions, and Dario Fo

• Joseph Farrell, The Actor Who Writes: Dario Fo and the Nobel Prize