Mo' Fo

Sydney Morning Herald

Friday July 10, 1998

STEPHEN DUNNE

When Dario Fo won the Noble Prize for Literature last year, the citation read in part: "who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden." Born in 1926, the occasional communist, lifelong anarchist and professional irritant is a rare and precious creature of the left - the committed, political man with a genuine and working sense of humour.

You know he's important - the Reagan administration was sufficiently scared of Fo to twice deny him a US visa when he tried to see productions of his plays on Broadway in the early '80s. While he's best known for masterpieces like Accidental Death of an Anarchist, Can't Pay, Won't Pay! and Mistero Buffo, Fo has written

more than 70 plays. Footlight Theatre Company has picked up a recent Fo to start a season at the Newtown - Abducting Diana (an English adaptation of the original Il Ratto della Francesca).

The adaptation, by Stephen Stenning, changes the lead character's name to Diana - very appropriate for a satire on the power of the mass media, according to director Chris Bendall. "I think the original intention from the British translator was using Di as the ultimate victim/manipulator of the media," he says. (The character, written for Fo's wife and collaborator Franca Rame, was originally a baker.)

Bendall loves the text: "I'd wanted to do a Fo for a while and I hadn't found one that grabbed me enough to go, 'Yes I've got to do this one'. Then I just found this one in a theatre bookstore - it must have just arrived. The title grabbed me straight away: a media satire called something about Diana. I read it and just loved it. I think it's hysterical. It's the funniest Fo play easily. Probably the funniest play I've read."

It's set in an ice-cream factory, with Diana (not, of course, the dead merchandising genius) attempting to take control of a situation that includes holding her own kidnappers at ransom, beating fraud allegations and dealing with a gun-crazy priest and his altar boy, who wish to perform an exorcism on her mother.

It sounds like typical Fo territory - a mix of political satire, farcical comedy and the slightly scatological. Bendall thinks that now is the time to put more Fo into this country's cultural life.

"Particularly at the moment, with all the One Nation stuff that's going on, it's nice to put something on from the broad left side of things, to kind of get some perspective again."

Abducting Diana runs at the Newtown Theatre until July 18.