Dario Fo

Who is Dario Fo?

Dario Fo is an Italian actor-playwright, comedian, singer, theatre director, stage designer, songwriter and political campaigner, and recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature. "Arguably the most widely performed contemporary playwright in world theatre", much of his dramatic work depends on improvisation and comprises the recovery of "illegitimate" forms of theatre, such as those performed by giullari and, more famously, the ancient Italian style of commedia dell'arte.

His plays have been translated into 30 languages and performed across the world, including in Argentina, Chile, England, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, and Yugoslavia. His work of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s is peppered with criticisms of assassinations, corruption, organised crime, racism, Roman Catholic theology and war. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, he took to lampooning Forza Italia and its leader Silvio Berlusconi, while his targets of the 2010s have included the banks amid the European sovereign-debt crisis.