Dario Fo at 100: A very funny playwright with a deadly serious purpose | stage

IIn Britain, we tend to separate political and popular theatre. The genius of Dario Fo, who was born 100 years ago on Tuesday, is that he brought them together in his multiple roles as playwright, actor, director and designer. With his wife, Franca Rami, he made fun of people in plays such as “The Accidental Death of an Anarchist” and “Can’t I Pay?” You will not pay! It achieved a global reach that earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997.

You could say protest and performance were in his genes. His father was a station manager and part-time actor, who joined him in resisting the Nazis in northern Italy during the war, where he helped smuggle Allied soldiers across the border into Switzerland. However, he became famous in 1962 when he and his wife presented a weekly television variety show that attracted large audiences: an association that ended abruptly when they refused to accept cuts imposed by censorship.

They eventually founded their own theater company, Nuova Scena, which in 1969 presented the first performance of Mistero Buffo, Fo’s much-traveled one-man show. Inspired by medieval texts, it satirized the rituals, hierarchy and mysticism of the Catholic Church. In one scene, Christ is seen kicking Pope Boniface VIII on the ass for his decadence and corruption, and when Fo performed Mistero Buffo on the box, the Vatican condemned it as “the most blasphemous show in the history of television.”

However, it was Fo’s plays that injected new life into political theatre. The most famous is accidental death, which derives from the case of a Milan railway worker who was falsely accused of planting bombs and who “fell” from the fourth-floor window of police headquarters. I still remember the first London production with Alfred Molina, who looked like Tommy Cooper in Speed, giving a brilliant performance as a revolutionary figure masquerading as a magistrate reopening the case. When the play was revived in 2023, in a Sheffield Crucible production transferred to the West End, Daniel Rigby was very funny and the work was not dated one bit: we were reminded that in the UK more than 3,000 people had died in police custody since the play’s premiere in 1970.

While he seamlessly blended comedy and ideology, one of Fo’s great gifts was giving actors interesting roles. In Trumpets and Raspberries, which arrived in the West End via Watford, Griff Rhys Jones gives an iconic performance as a communist shop steward who is facially indistinguishable from Fiat boss Gianni Agnelli, the latter having undergone plastic surgery. There were good verbal gags (“When I was 14, I got a cowboy outfit – and I’ve been running it ever since,” Agnelli said) but it was the sight of Rhys Jones transforming from bespectacled worker to taxidermied businessman that indicated we were watching a politicized fido farce.

From an interview I conducted with Fu in London in 1983, two things stand out. The first, despite their popularity, is the amount of harassment Fu and Rami had to endure over the years: as well as drawing the wrath of both the Catholic Church and the Communist Party and being physically intimidated, they faced 45 trials by the Italian police. The other thing that caught my attention was that for Fo, who died in 2016, comedy was a means to a political end. He told me: “Tragedy is the basis of everything I write. We must never forget that Accidental Death concerns a man thrown out of a window, and that he can’t pay? He won’t pay! It depends on a starving man. You must always be aware of that fact. Laughter is simply a way of making the audience face the problem.”

It served as a salutary reminder that Fo, though one of the theater’s greatest artists, was also a man with a mission to make us confront cruelty, injustice, and oppression in all their forms.