Nobels: 1997: Dario Fo

I'm admitting defeat on this. It's like poetry in translation only worse. These are plays and written by someone with an obvious relish for slang and dialect. In performance in translation I understand that Fo allowed and encouraged liberties to be taken to localise the plays. Within this collection there's a short example of this, in which part of Mistero Buffo is translated into Lallans, but mostly these are straight translations: to be read rather than to be performed.

And they don't work as such. Mistero Buffo, for example, is a series of short dramas based on the way minstrels (giullari) would have performed them and there's also a lot of reference to puppetry. In English terms we'd be looking at mystery plays made into pantos  with bits of Punch and Judy thrown in. The cultural gap is too big, and so stagings would have to use the text as a starting point. Even more than usual with theatre the productions would be a shared endeavour. No doubt Fo's own stagings were terrific - he enjoyed great popular success - but his ability in that is simply not available to me.

It's a similar, but less serious situation with the best known play in this collection, Accidental Death of an Anarchist. As a good playwright, Fo leaves a lot for the actors to do. So much so that I can't form an opinion on how good a playwright he is.

He's another example of the Academy's tendency to give the prize to writers who have suffered persecution and censorship. As I've said before, I don't have a problem with that: it's entirely legitimate to use the prize as a plea for freedom of speech. The Wikipedia article on Fo is long and detailed about this.

Fo seems to be somewhat forgotten now but his concern about the hidden power of right wing politicians may become horribly fashionable again.

Dario Fo, Plays 1 Methuen 1992