Staging Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Anglo-American Approaches to Political Theatre (review)

Luigi Pirandello, one of Dario Fo's predecessors in Italian theatre, was given to worrying obsessively about the single or multiple nature of human personality, and about a related clash between 'the face and the mask', a clash which was not a dispute between an inauthentic mask placed over an authentic but concealed face, but a more subtle process whereby each successive mask-over-mask had equal claim to authenticity, or inauthenticity, while the face was unknowable. Fo operates in a different intellectual tradition and owes little to Pirandello, but it may be that these Pirandellian formulae are the most apt metaphors for the varied, seemingly incompatible, Fos known to theatre-goers and critics in different countries. It is continually repeated that Fo is the most frequently performed of all living playwrights, so it can hardly be expected, especially granted the political nature of his playwriting, that the Fo who fills theatres in Milan can be the one appreciated in Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, or Colombo. Stefania Taviano, who now teaches in Sicily but who previously worked in both Britain and North America, has tackled this question with an insightful, splendidly researched study of Fo's reception in two English-speaking countries.

She deals firstly with abstract critical debates on the process of transferring theatre from one culture to another, and secondly with the question of defining 'political theatre' in a philosophical environment marked by postmodernism before offering case-by-case studies of the translation and staging of the few works by Fo known to theatres in Britain and the USA. Her chapters on Fo in America are by far the best, perhaps because her knowledge of staging Fo there was gained at first hand, so that while she quotes widely from American periodicals, as she does in regard to England and Scotland, she also has access to more immediate information and is less reliant on the subjective reactions of reviewers.

No doubt the contemporary requirements of academic publishing compelled her to open with a 'theoretical' discourse, but once she has complied with these demands, she leaves 'theory' and its jargon aside in favour of detailed analyses of specific productions. She refers,for instance, to Hal Foster's distinction between 'transgressive' and 'resistant' politics in theatre, and writes that 'postmodernism has shown that such transgression is impossible since no cultural action can go beyond the context in which it was produced'. This is dubious and hardly the point, since Bertolt Brecht and G. B. Shaw as well as Dario Fo have written plays which can be called political and whose purpose was not to question the 'context' but to challenge prevailing values, ethics, and ideology. The assertion sits uneasily with the body of the book, where Taviano's well-founded premise is that there is indeed a genre of theatre which can be called 'political', and that most companies in the UK and USA have made a pig's ear of presenting to their audiences the political theatre created by Fo.

Taviano is uncertain too over whether the fact that there has emerged a British Fo, separate from the Italian Fo, and consequently presented in terms of British theatre history, is an inescapable consequence of the very process of cultural and linguistic transfer, a deplorable act of insouciance on the part of theatrical world, or a sign of the sheer exuberance of Fo's creative vitality. She quotes the late David Hirst as saying that the Fo presented to audiences in Britain is a 'distortion', and seems to incline to that view herself, but also cites the postmodern thinking that would see every translation not as a linguistic transposition but as a deeper switch between cultures, from source culture to target culture. This is the crux of the matter. If the transfer madeis indeed so deep as to amount to 'appropriation', it may well be that we have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that...