Dario Fo

Dario Fo was born in Sangiano, near Lake Maggiore, the son of a railway stationmaster whose postings moved the family along the Swiss border; his mother later wrote a memoir of the region’s peasant life. He studied architecture in Milan and painting at the Brera academy before turning to radio, revue and cabaret. In 1954 he married the actress Franca Rame, who became his partner on stage and in writing for more than half a century.

Through the late 1950s and 1960s Fo and Rame wrote and performed farces that grew steadily more political, and in 1968 they left the commercial theatre to perform for working-class audiences. Mistero Buffo (1969), a solo show built from medieval sources and delivered partly in grammelot, an invented speech of sounds and fragments of dialect, recast the Gospels and church history from the point of view of the poor. Accidental Death of an Anarchist, prompted by the death of the anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli in police custody in Milan, and Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! became his most widely produced plays. Much of his work relied on improvisation and was rewritten in performance.

The Nobel Prize in 1997 surprised many in Italy, where Fo had long been a target of censorship and political hostility, and confirmed him as one of the most performed playwrights in the world. He continued to write, act and paint into old age, satirising Silvio Berlusconi and engaging in politics until his death in Milan in 2016.