Dario Fo

Dario Fo is an Italian satirist playwright, theater director and composer. He was born on March 24, 1926 to Leggiuno, and Varese in Lombardy, Italy. His father, Felce, was a railway station master, part-time actor and socialist. The family moved constantly when his father was transferred between posts. He learned storytelling from his maternal grandfather, fishers and glassblowers along the way. Fo was inspired by the circus and carnivals; his theatre now uses slapsticks, puns, ridicule, and explores social and political issues and criticizes any authority. He was trained in painting at the Brera Academy and in architecture at the Polytechnic Institution of Milan from 1940 to 1945. When World War II begun, his family had been active in anti-fascist resistance and often he helped his father to smuggle refugees and Allied soldiers to Switzerland. Dario was enlisted into the army of Salo republic in the end of the war but he escaped and managed to hide for the rest of the war.

Fo first concentrated on set design, but then began to improvise comic monologues, satirical sketches, and fantastical narratives. After abandoning his art and his architec

tural studies, he devoted himself entirely to the theatre, first by acting and writing for theatres and later by directing plays and operas and working on Italy’s national radio and television programs. He was influenced by, the work of French mime Jacques LeCoq, and the much admired and skilled theatre of the Rame family, whose gifted daughter, Franca Rame, married Fo in 1954. In 1955 he moved to Rome with his wife, and they had a son named, Jacopo. The Rames were professionals who performed

noblemen don't exist any more, he himself makes his low-class buddies laugh; he is their jester. Although this worked for a while, even the confines imposed on Fo by the

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