Italy’s Dario Fo Wins Nobel Prize for Literature

Dario Fo, the modern-day Italian jester whose leading roles in his own plays mix linguistic buffoonery with biting left-wing political satire, on Thursday became the first performer to win the Nobel Prize for literature.

Revealing its surprise choice, the Swedish Academy said the 71-year-old playwright’s prodigious work “emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden.”

“With a blend of laughter and gravity, he opens our eyes to abuses and injustices in society and also the wider historical perspective in which they can be placed,” said the citation read in Stockholm.

Mime, stand-up comic, dramatist, historian and pundit, Fo has outraged the rich, the religious and the political right with more than 70 plays, including “Accidental Death of an Anarchist” and his one-man show “Comic Mystery.”

He is equally known for an expressive, rubber-faced delivery and his use of “grammelot,” a jesting language he invented from dialect and onomatopoeia. One Italian critic likened his body language to that of Jerry Lewis, his wickedly irreverent tongue to that of the late Lenny Bruce.

Though his plays have been translated into more than a dozen languages and staged in about 30 countries, Fo had never been considered a leading candidate for the prize and its $1-million purse. Critics say this is because his scripts are not so much finished works as skeletons for improvised performances.

“He’s a genius, a great stage man, but I’m not sure this is literature,” said Irene Bignardi, a critic for the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.

The Nobel jury chose Fo from among more than 200 authors, poets and playwrights, passing over top contenders Jose Saramago of Portugal and Ismail Kadare of Albania, novelists who would have been the first in their respective languages to win the prize.

Also left behind was poet Mario Luzi, Italy’s perennial Nobel contender, who fumed at the news: “I’ve had it up to here!”

The award dismayed the Vatican and Italian politicians whom Fo has lampooned, and it baffled some previous Nobel laureates who had never heard of him. But it drew wide if not universal applause in Italy, where he had long ago won celebrity as a television performer between bouts with the censors.

“Like the medieval jester, Fo occupies a marginal area of the stage, but it is an area that belongs to the people,” said Osvaldo Guerrieri, theater critic for the Italian newspaper La Stampa. “It took a true act of courage to reward such a figure of popular culture.”

The news reached Fo in theatrical fashion, as a popular Italian TV host was driving him from Rome to his home in Milan for her series on “Travels With Famous People.” A TV crew in another car pulled alongside them at 70 mph and held up a sign saying: “Dario, you won the Nobel!”

They pulled off at the next exit, bought champagne and toasted.

“I’m stunned,” Fo told the Italian news agency ANSA by mobile telephone. He called the prize a “recognition of the spoken, recited word.”

“This Nobel is also Franca’s,” he added, crediting his longtime stage partner Franca Rame, whom he married in 1954. “I’d like to think that the consistency of our discourse was rewarded today . . . the theme of class struggle, even if by now only we call it that.”

“This will pay him back for the many, many humiliations he suffered,” Rame said. “We have struggled a lot, suffering unjust criticism for our positions.”

Fo grew up on the shore of Lake Maggiore in what he calls a blue-collar “town of smugglers and fishermen.” His grandfather was a popular storyteller, his father a railway stationmaster and part-time actor. Dario studied architecture but was drawn to the stage and television as outlets for his Marxist views.

A TV show produced by Fo and his wife was censored in 1962 for siding with workers in a labor dispute, and they were banned from the state-run airwaves for 15 years. When state-owned theaters shunned them too, they formed a troupe backed by the Italian Communist Party and took their shows to piazzas, tents and factories.

“Comic Mystery,” regarded as Fo’s masterpiece, was inspired by the student revolts of 1968 and had theatrical roots in the strolling players and minstrels of the Middle Ages. The monologue, which drew 1 million spectators on its 18-month tour of Italy, ridiculed the Roman Catholic Church through a retelling of the Gospels, prompting Pope Paul VI to declare that Fo had “desecrated Italian religious feelings.”

On Thursday, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano commented: “Giving the prize to an actor who is also an author of debatable texts--leaving aside every moral consideration--has surpassed all imagination.”

The Nobel jury singled out Fo’s “Accidental Death of an Anarchist” as an exemplary expose of “the lies of officialdom.”

That play, based on right-wing bomb attacks in Italy in 1969 that were blamed on anarchists, describes the real-life police interrogation of an innocent suspect who fell to his death from a fifth-floor window in what officials called a suicide. A decade later the play was a hit in London.

Even at the height of their popularity in the 1970s, Fo and Rame were the target of hate groups at home. Rame was kidnapped and raped in 1973 by a gang of Italian fascists.

Though they broke with the Communist Party in 1970, the couple’s leftist causes got them barred from the United States a decade later. They were admitted in 1984 to watch the Broadway production of “Accidental Death,” which starred Jonathan Pryce, Bill Irwin and Patti LuPone. The couple returned two years later for their first performance tour of the United States.

“Dario Fo is an original,” said Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum, which staged “Accidental Death” in 1983. “For him there is no separation between politics and art. He’s a total theater man as opposed to a literary man. This shows a leap of imagination on the part of the Nobel committee.”

Despite a stroke last year that left him partly blind, Fo remains a fixture on the Italian stage--a solitary player in a black turtleneck.

His latest play, “The Devil With Boobs,” is a satiric comedy set in the Renaissance, featuring a zealous judge and a woman possessed by the devil. It premiered in August.

Times theater critic Laurie Winer in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Winning Writer

PLAYWRIGHT DARIO FO

Major works: “Accidental Death of an Anarchist,” “Mistero Buffo,” “We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay!”

Judges cited: His emulation of “the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden.”

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EXCERPT

‘The truth is an anarchist cares about his job more than anything else. Basically, they’re pretty-bourgeois . . . attached to their small comforts: fixed salary once a month, benefits, bonus, retirement pension, health insurance, a tranquil old age . . . believe me, nobody thinks about his own retirement more than an anarchist.’

--From “Accidental Death of an Anarchist”