I waited for the lions. In my child’s mind, that big top could only be a circus. And a circus without lions was a promise unkept. So at a certain point I said so. Not out loud — or perhaps yes, far too loudly: «Ok, but when do the lions come?»

I didn’t know it. I didn’t yet know who he was, or what he was doing, or why that voice filled the space differently from any other voice I’d ever heard. I only knew that he had answered. That my interruption had broken nothing — it had been traversed, absorbed, returned multiplied. The audience laughed. I didn’t understand why, but I felt that something had happened.

Today, a hundred years after his birth — 24 March 1926, in Sangiano, on Lake Maggiore — I can put a name to what happened.

The Body as Instrument, the Space as Choice

The medieval jester, in the tradition that Fo studied and reinterpreted with philological rigour, had no fourth wall. He spoke to whoever stood before him. He provoked, included, responded. He was a body in relation, not a voice projected into the void. All of Fo’s dramaturgy — from Mistero Buffo, the monologue that in those years toured Italy through big tops and squares and factories, to the great political farces — stems from this premise: the theatre is not a place where someone speaks and someone else listens. It is a space where something happens between human beings who are present, here, now.

The big top I found myself in that evening — almost certainly the Teatro Tendastrisce, opened in 1977 on Via Cristoforo Colombo, one of the Roman venues Fo frequented in those years — was already in itself a semantic choice. Not an Italian-style theatre, with its architectural hierarchies, its stalls and galleries, the silence imposed by velvet and chandeliers. A circus tent. The choice of space as a declaration of poetics.

It is neither an innocent nor a casual choice. Fo had abandoned traditional theatres by the late nineteen-sixties, when, together with Franca Rame, he had founded the Associazione Nuova Scena in 1968, and then the Collettivo Teatrale La Comune in 1970, choosing to bring theatre where theatre did not go: occupied factories, workers’ clubs, case del popolo, squares. It was a political choice, certainly, but it was also something deeper: the conviction that the physical location of a performance determines the kind of relationship established between actor and audience, and that this relationship is the beating heart of everything. Fo had developed this idea from his own reflections on the connection between gesture and environment: those who live by working with their bodies, he held, develop a physicality that bourgeois theatre cannot recognise or accommodate. The alternative space was the practical answer to this conviction.

The circus tent occupied an intermediate position — ambiguous and fertile: it was not the factory, nor the traditional theatre. It was a space that evoked popular festivity, improvisation, mild danger — the possibility that something might go wrong, that an acrobat might fall, that a beast might escape from its cage. A seven-year-old waiting for the lions was not wrong. He was reading the space with the only encyclopaedia available to him, and that encyclopaedia said: big top equals circus, circus equals lions. The mistake was perfectly logical. It was, in a sense, the right answer to the wrong question.

The Roots: the Lake, the Glassblowers, the Grandfather with the Sharp Tongue

Dario Fo is born into a family that already holds the seeds of what he will become. His father, Felice, is a stationmaster for the Italian State Railways and an amateur actor, passionate about Ibsen, who takes his son to see performances from an early age and acts in local amateur companies. He is a man of the left, who in the lake environment knows that blend of craftsmanship, socialism and oral culture that will leave a deep mark on his son. His mother, Pina Rota, a farmer’s daughter, will later write a book of memoirs about life on the lake between the wars — Il paese delle rane, published by Einaudi in 1978 — which reveals a silent, tenacious writer of rare quality.

But it is the marginal figures, those of the oral tradition, who truly shape the child Dario: his maternal grandfather, known as Bristìn — pepper seed —, a street vendor with a razor-sharp wit and an inexhaustible gift for inventing grafts between fruits and vegetables; and above all the glassblowers and poachers of Lake Maggiore, oral storytellers whose art Fo absorbs before he even knows the name of what he is learning. Porto Valtravaglia, the village of his childhood, is a colony of glassblowers — a trade that demands rhythm, breath, coordination between body and material — and of night fishermen who go out with their lamps. From them Fo learns stories: not as texts to be recited, but as living matter that transforms in the mouth of the teller, different every time, adapted each time to the audience and the occasion.

The formal artistic training comes later: the Brera Academy, architectural studies at the Politecnico di Milano abandoned before graduation, the encounter with Franco Parenti and Giustino Durano in the early nineteen-fifties, the collaboration with RAI on the radio programme Poer nano, the first theatrical revues, the television variety shows of the nineteen-sixties before censorship became unbearable. But all of this is surface. The core is the lake, the grandfather, the fishermen. It is there that Fo learns that a story works when the teller and the listener are in the same place at the same moment, and between them passes something electric and unpredictable.

The Rame family, from which Franca comes, carries an even older and more directly theatrical genealogy: travelling actors for at least five generations, with an archive of scripts and lazzi going back to the seventeenth century. Franca’s uncle, Tomaso Rame, was a passionate playwright who had preserved precious materials that Fo will use in his philological research. When Dario and Franca meet in the mid-nineteen-fifties and marry on 24 June 1954 in the basilica of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan, it is not merely the meeting of two people: it is the merging of two traditions. Fo brings the popular oral culture of the north, the street narrative, improvisation. Franca brings the written theatrical memory, the scripts of the commedia dell’arte players, the technique refined across centuries of stage work. From this fusion something emerges that had not existed before.

Mistero Buffo: An Anthropological Proposition

Mistero Buffo officially premieres on 1 October 1969 in Sestri Levante, after months of rehearsals and readings in workers’ clubs. It is a show that resembles nothing Italian theatre was producing at the time. A man alone on stage — Fo, without a set, without costumes worthy of the name, without the conventional narrative structure of beginning, development, epilogue — who plays multiple characters in a semi-invented language, the grammelot, drawn from a mixture of Padanian dialects, archaic Lombard, old Venetian, onomatopoeia and pure invention. He tells apocryphal Gospel episodes, stories of medieval jesters, peasant giullarate that demystify the power of the Church and the courts, reinterpreted through the lens of class struggle.

The Vatican reacted with outrage when the show was broadcast on RAI on 22 April 1977 — after fourteen years of television exile, during which Fo had been effectively banned from the public broadcaster. L’Osservatore Romano issued a fierce condemnation of the transmission. Cardinal Ugo Poletti, Vicar of the Diocese of Rome, telegraphed directly to Prime Minister Andreotti to express «grief and protest at the profane and anti-cultural television broadcast,» adding his «profound humiliation at the inconceivable vulgarity of a public transmission that degrades the Italian nation before the world.» Parish priests across Italy were urged to condemn the show in their Sunday sermons. It is probably the highest unintentional compliment Fo ever received.

The jester, the central figure of Mistero Buffo, is for Fo not merely a theatrical type: he is an anthropological and political category. In the speech delivered in Stockholm for the Nobel ceremony in December 1997 — one of the most irreverent the ceremony has ever hosted, illustrated with boards drawn by Fo himself — he titled his address Contra Jogulatores Obloquentes, citing the law promulgated by Frederick II of Swabia in 1221 in Messina, which permitted any citizen to insult, beat and kill jesters without incurring any sanction. It was a law that revealed how deeply power feared that figure at its margins: the jester who said what no one else could say. Fo used this medieval precedent as a mirror for the present: every confiscated show, every police raid, every lawsuit accumulated — and in the nineteen-seventies he collected hundreds in a single tour — fell within that same machinery of suppression.

This submerged history is what Fo brings to the surface. And he does it not with an academic thesis but with the body, on stage, before an audience that does not know it is attending a lesson in theatre history but laughs and is moved and — this is the point — understands.

Political Theatre: From Farce to Denunciation

Mistero Buffo is the show that identifies Fo in the world, but it would be wrong to reduce his dramaturgy to that form. Fo’s political theatre is varied, technically inventive, capable of moving from monologue to choral farce without losing the coherence of a vision.

One must understand the historical climate in which these texts are born in order to grasp the radicality of the choice. The years in which Fo builds his most important political theatre — from 1968 to roughly 1977 — are the years in which Italy lives through one of its most convulsive seasons: the workers’ struggles of the Hot Autumn of 1969, the Piazza Fontana massacre in December of that year, the Years of Lead that open and multiply throughout the decade. In this context, making political theatre was not an intellectual exercise: it was an act with concrete consequences. Police would raid theatres before performances began. In this climate, the choice of farce as a political instrument followed a precise logic: comedy made persecution more difficult, because sanctioning laughter appeared grotesque, yet it did not offer complete protection, because power knows how to recognise a threat even when it laughs.

Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!, from 1974, takes its starting point from a real event — the self-reduction of prices in supermarkets during the economic crisis of the early nineteen-seventies — and constructs a slapstick farce around the daily insubordination of the subaltern classes. Two women come home having taken their shopping without paying, hide the goods from their husbands and the carabinieri with increasingly absurd stratagems, and the comedy transforms into a reflection on the legitimacy of civil disobedience. Fo is never ideologically naive: he knows that laughter is an ambivalent instrument, capable of liberating but also of neutralising. The farce works when it sustains that tension without resolving it, when it leaves the audience with laughter in the throat and something that still burns.

And then there is the body of work known as Female Parts (Tutta casa, letto e chiesa), written together with Franca Rame and performed by her, which occupies a distinct place in the Fo-Rame output for reasons that go beyond dramaturgy. Female monologues — on abortion, sexism, domestic violence, the invisible labour of women — that Franca brought to the stage with a technical precision and a stage presence that rivalled her husband’s. These texts are born from Franca’s direct experience, from her voice, her body, her personal history — including the violence she suffered in March 1973 at the hands of five neo-fascists who abducted her, raped her, burned her with cigarettes, slashed her with razor blades, and abandoned her in a park. That violence would become the monologue The Rape (Lo stupro), one of the most harrowing and formidable texts in the entire repertoire, which in 1977 Franca brought to the stage presenting it initially as something that had happened to an unknown woman. To attribute these texts to Fo alone would not only be a historical injustice: it would be a radical misunderstanding of how they came to exist.

A Total Artist: Painting, Stage Design, the Graphic Sign

There is a dimension of Fo that literary history has systematically underestimated, and which the centenary offers an opportunity to bring back into focus: the visual. Fo was a painter, illustrator, set designer, costume designer. Not as a hobby and not as a secondary activity alongside theatre: his pictorial output accompanies his entire career with continuity and with a precise, recognisable aesthetic identity — one that feeds from the same sources as his theatre — the commedia dell’arte, medieval illumination, the popular Lombard tradition — but processes them through an autonomous graphic sign that is immediately identifiable.

The posters for his shows he drew himself, with that synthetic and dynamic line that recalls certain Russian constructivist posters but has more direct roots in nineteenth-century political caricature and in the illustrations of itinerant storytellers. The stage designs — when they existed, since the stage was often intentionally bare — he designed himself. The costumes for many shows, likewise. On his tomb at the Monumental Cemetery in Milan, he wanted the words «Jester and painter» inscribed: not playwright, not actor, not Nobel Laureate. Jester and painter. The two words he felt were most truly his.

In 2012, at the age of eighty-six, he opened an exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan featuring over four hundred works spanning the full arc of his life. It was not a commemorative tribute to an old artist: it was the work of someone who had never stopped painting and drawing, in parallel with theatre, often using it as a visual notebook for what theatre was elaborating. The gangly, contorted body on stage is the same body that appears in his illustrations, with that twisting neck and bulging eyes that anyone who saw him perform recognises immediately. This total dimension of the artist — unspecialised, uncompartmentalised, capable of moving between theatre and painting, between dramatic writing and historical research, between acting and opera direction (Fo also directed opera, beginning with The Barber of Seville in 1986, for which he also designed sets and costumes) — is one of the elements that make it difficult to place him within the usual categories of Italian cultural historiography.

International Reception and the Italian Paradox

There is an irony in the history of Fo’s reception that is worth registering. By the early nineteen-eighties, Dario Fo was already the most performed Italian author in the world — more than Goldoni, more than Pirandello, more than Eduardo De Filippo. His texts were translated into thirty languages, staged in Argentina, Bulgaria, India, South Korea, Sweden, the United States. Accidental Death of an Anarchist had played in London, Paris and New York to great critical and popular success. Mistero Buffo had become an international phenomenon that crossed linguistic barriers by means of the grammelot, which requires no translation because it speaks before language.

And yet in Italy, throughout this entire period, Fo was viewed with suspicion by the cultural establishment. The established theatres kept their distance. Academic literary criticism ignored him. Television had banned him for fourteen years. This paradox — maximally represented abroad, systematically marginalised at home — is one of the most revealing data points in the cultural history of postwar Italy. It says something about the relationship between Italian cultural institutions and popular theatre, between the academy and the oral tradition, between the literary canon and the forms that canon struggles to contain.

The situation would normalise gradually, aided in part by the Nobel in 1997, which obliged the Italian cultural system to reckon with an anomaly it had chosen not to see. But even after the Nobel the prejudices did not entirely disappear: a certain reluctance persisted, in the more traditional literary circles, to accept that an author of farces could stand on the same shelf as Leopardi and Manzoni. As though laughter contaminated literature, rather than being part of it.

The Nobel and Its Misunderstandings

In 1997, when the Swedish Academy awards the Nobel Prize in Literature to Dario Fo, reactions in Italy range from bewilderment to scandalised incomprehension. More credentialled writers feel passed over. Literary critics ask what a theatrical author has to do with literature. Someone declares, with that curious mixture of snobbery and ignorance that characterises certain Italian cultural milieus, that they don’t even know who he is.

Fo laughs. It is the most sensible response. And, with a gesture that says much about both him and Franca, he donates the entire prize money — more than one billion six hundred and fifty million lire — to disabled people, through the «Il Nobel per i disabili» committee founded by Franca herself.

The question that more than one critic has raised remains open, and legitimate: can Fo’s theatre, in its performative density, survive separation from the body that performed it? Mistero Buffo on the page is a fascinating text; Mistero Buffo as performed by Fo was an unrepeatable event. Was the Nobel honouring the writer or the actor-manager? The question has no certain answer, but it is the right question: because it touches the theoretical knot that Fo himself had placed at the centre of all his reflection. Is the text the theatre, or is the text merely the trace of something that happens elsewhere — in the body, in the presence, in the living exchange with the audience?

Fo himself will give the Nobel no more weight than it deserves. He will continue to work, to write, to draw, and to give lectures around the world with the same energy as always. The institutional recognition did not touch him at a deep level, in the sense that it did not change the way he related to theatre and to audiences. He remained, to the very last, that body on stage that answers a child waiting for the lions.

The Shadows of the Portrait

This is not the moment for hagiographic celebrations. Fo was a contradictory man, and those contradictions belong to the complete portrait as much as the masterpieces do.

His uncritical adherence to certain myths of the extra-parliamentary left in the nineteen-seventies — the contacts with the Soccorso rosso network, the ideological proximity to movements that in that period theorised violence as a political instrument, the Manichean simplification of complex historical events reduced to blunt oppositional schemes — constitutes a zone of shadow that history cannot cancel with the Nobel or with the passing of a hundred years. Claudio Meldolesi, in his Su un comico in rivolta of 1978, had already identified the limitation with precision: Fo’s Manichaeism, his tendency to construct satire on a binary system of oppressed and oppressors that works magnificently on stage but betrays the complexity of reality. The theatrical power of that system is undeniable. Its analytical weakness, equally so.

There is also the question of his past in the Italian Social Republic during the war — on which accounts overlap and contradict one another, with Fo himself having changed his reconstruction of events more than once over the years. This is not the place to reopen a judicial file that the courts have in any case examined. But it is the place to recall that a mature portrait does not cut out the uncomfortable parts to make the image fit.

What remains, beyond the contradictions, is an artist who changed Italian theatre irreversibly. Who brought audiences that had never crossed the threshold of a theatre under a Roman big top. Who defended throughout his life the dignity of popular theatre against the contempt of the academy and the censorship of power. Who, to a child waiting for the lions, knew how to respond without losing the thread, without losing the stage, without losing anything.

The Legacy and the Question of Franca Rame

The centenary celebrations, opened on 24 March, are already a machine in motion: an evening at the Teatro Sistina, an institutional event at the Ministry of Culture with the establishment of the National Committee for the Celebrations, a commemorative postage stamp, a programme that the Fondazione Fo-Rame has extended to at least one hundred countries with more than two hundred authorised productions. A dense year, which also coincides with the tenth anniversary of Fo’s death — which occurred on 13 October 2016 at the Sacco hospital in Milan, ninety years old, singing in the ward until the end.

But the most significant aspect of the Foundation’s work in recent years is not organisational: it is historiographical. Since 2020, all texts and productions are published with the double authorship, Fo-Rame. It is a belated but necessary correction, and the centenary serves, in the words of Fo’s granddaughter Mattea Fo who chairs the Foundation, as «a catalyst for those who had not yet adapted.»

Returning to the child in the front row, in the Roman big top of the late nineteen-seventies.

The lions came. They were not the ones I had expected — there were no cages, no tamer with a whip, no roar I had imagined. There was a man who with his voice and his body produced things I had never seen anyone do before: he transformed silence into expectation, expectation into laughter, laughter into something that had no name but that I recognised as true. He was dangerous in a way I did not yet know how to describe but could feel. He was free in a way that seemed to me impossible.