| Dario Fo has always been a controversial author over the past fifty years, his plays have been attacked either because of the political ideas expressed in them, or because they were deemed superficial and historically inaccurate. The purpose of this study is two-fold: to prove that Fo's plays are for the most part well-structured political farces, extremely well-researched when set in an age different from the contemporary, and to show how innovative Fo's acting and staging techniques and languages are.My focus is mainly on the wide selection of monologues grouped under the title Mistero Buffo, a play that has expanded in size in the past thirty years. Fo's attention to the Middle Ages and to the re-creation of the figure of the jester allows him to find a spokesperson for the culture of the lower classes in the '70s, and to invent a stage language that exemplifies the effort to convey a message when verbal language may fail. Fo's model for the linguistic koine of dialects and onomatopoeic sounds is largely the sixteenth century Paduan author Angelo Beolco, who used a mixture of peasant Paduan dialect, Venetian, Bergamasque and Florentine in his plays, and partly the jesters' rhymes from the Middle Ages. His models for the physical language he uses to supplement the verbal one are Arlecchino's lazzi from the early days of the Commedia dell'Arte , and the teachings of the mime Jacques Lecoq.What Fo accomplished by combining an invented verbal language with a very effective physical one is not only the creation of an original mode of expression for the stage, but also an apt medium to express his political convictions, by showing that culture is a mixture of high and low forms. |
