The Playwright vs. the Prime Minister
D'Ambroso, Antonino
The Playwright vs. the Prime Minister By Antonino D'Ambroso Dario Fo, the radical, Nobel Prize-winning Italian playwright and actor, has finally set his satirical sights on Italy's notorious prime...
...And their major, unforgivable fault was this: In telling these things, they made people laugh...
...In a scene that is vintage Fo, the terrorists gun down Putin as he and Berlusconi ready themselves for bed by practicing karate in matching kimonos...
...the Prime Minister By Antonino D'Ambroso Dario Fo, the radical, Nobel Prize-winning Italian playwright and actor, has finally set his satirical sights on Italy's notorious prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi...
...After forging a tenuous coalition among the three major Italian rightwing parties and amassing control of Italy's media, Berlusconi became Italy's prime minister in 2001 for a second time...
...Government officials tried to censor the play by demanding that Fo hand over the text for their review...
...They "were despised for bringing onto the stage the everyday life, joys, and desperation of the common people...
...These scenes give the play its greatest force...
...The result is the hilarious and surreal play Two-Headed Anomaly...
...At the outset, we learn that Berlusconi has just had an emergency operation...
...A large portion of Two-Headed Anomaly revolves around the Italian leader and his wife, Veronica Lario, played by Franca Rame, Fo's partner in life and art...
...Fo fears, as many do in Italy and throughout Europe, that Berlusconi's political power, combined with his vast wealth and controlling interest in more than 80 percent of the Italian media, presents a conflict of interest that undermines democracy and leads to fraud, censorship, and the suppression of basic rights...
...Can't pay...
...Antonino DAmbroso, filmmaker and writer, is the director of the La Lutta NMC, an independent media and production organization based in New York City...
...When Silvio Berlsuconi first served as Italy's prime minister in 1994, his government lasted only seven months as it crumbled due to his indictment for tax fraud...
...His first tenure as Italy's leader was, in no uncertain terms, a farce...
...Laughter does not please the mighty...
...While Two-Headed Anomaly often leaves the audience laughing uncontrollably the play smartly tackles a serious concern in both Italian cultural life and politics...
...This period in Italy was one of incredible political turmoil and instability...
...My satire is a paradox, and it is grotesque," says Fo, just like the political situation that grips Italy today...
...Berlusconi has more than once described his political rivals' critiques as "persecution" similar to the "trials of Jesus Christ on the cross...
...With Putin dead the play moves into even more farcical territory...
...Berlusconi is depicted as a petulant adolescent who is constantly in need of approval while Lario is like a stern mother figure humoring her unruly mischievous child with patronizing words...
...And the mighty in Italy are not pleased with Fo and the success of Two-Headed Anomaly, which is on a sold-out tour of Italy...
...Two-Headed Anomaly represents Fo at his best, placing him in the tradition of Moli??re and Ruzzante Beolco, the father of the commedia dell'arte...
...Berlusconi has his hands in everything," Fo told reporters after a performance...
...He now is the country's second-longest-serving head of state since his political antecedent Benito Mussolini...
...Fo not only wrote and directs the play, he also has the lead part...
...With the increased attention came intense scrutiny of his politics, which led to death threats and repeated attempts at censorship that continue to dog him...
...Fo portrays Berlusconi, now with Putin's brain, as a two-and-a-half foot dwarf...
...Berlusconi's Forza Italia party initiated a lawsuit against Fo and is seeking more than a million dollars in damages caused by "unfounded personal attacks...
...Dogged by scandals, allegations of judicial bribery, and investigations for corruption, Berlusconi seems to be a real life version of Fo's fictional buffoon...
...He began to write at a prodigious clip, soon finding success...
...Putin and Berlusconi have forged an unusual relationship, one that seems to transcend typical diplomatic interactions between world leaders...
...Fo countered that he and Rame "could not sit by and watch what is happening in Italy," comparing the present situation to that addressed in Accidental Death of an Anarchist when leftists were thrown to their deaths from police windows...
...But to dismiss Berlusconi as a clown, as many do, is a grave mistake...
...As a young student at the Bera Art Academy in Milan, he decided to leave and join his parents in the resistance, where he helped smuggle Jewish scientists and British prisoners of war into Switzerland and cared for wounded partisans...
...To hysterical effect, Fo stands in a trench behind the stage with his arms hidden in pinstripe pants, his hands placed inside black shoes...
...It described the play as "not satire but persecution...
...Fo mocks the media oligarchs fondness for using crude and reactionary rhetoric to denounce those who oppose him politically...
...During this time, Fo created some of the most intelligent and dynamic theater of the twentieth century...
...Won't pay...
...the hypocrisy and arrogance of the high and mighty...
...He now shares the brain of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was killed by Chechen terrorists...
...Italy is really tragic, we've never been so low...
...His achievements include Guerra di popolo Chile (The People's War in Chile), Non si paga, non si paga...
...The similarities between Mussolini and Berlusconi have received much attention in Italy, thanks in large part to Berlusconi's continued public praise and unabashed admiration of the fascist leader...
...Returning to rule a mammoth media empire with his tail tucked neatly between his legs was not Berlusconi's intention...
...and the incessant injustice," he said...
...While accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997, Fo described the special kinship with Moli??re and Beolco, who both were mocked and censored by the leading men of letters of their times...
...Fo, who has fully recovered from a stroke he suffered some years back and is as crisp and engaging as ever at the age of seventy-seven, concocted the absurd premise after listening to Berlusconi praise Putin for his violent suppression of Chechen rebels...
...By contrast, Fo has spent a lifetime fighting fascism...
...There is an Italian comedian who performs from inside the trench," Berlusconi said in a recent interview, "to create the impression of a devilish dwarf...
...And in a country that has had more than fifty governments since World War II, Berlusconi declared that only he could turn Italy's fortunes around...
...In December, Nation Books/Avalon Press will publish his book, "Let Fury Have the Hour: The Politics of Joe Strummer...
...During the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, Fo fully realized his dream of a "popular theater, a literature, an artistic expression that spoke to everyone and is relevant," as he described in his book Tricks of the Trade...
...Fo's characterization of the emotionally stunted Berlusconi cleverly plays on the larger-than-life view the prime minister has of himself...
...and Morte accidente di un anarchio (Accidental Death of an Anarchist...
...From judicial corruption to government-sanctioned murders of leftists, Italy was reeling...
...Shortly after the war's end, Fo's interest in a new "popular stage" grew into an outlet for his deepening radical politics...
Vol. 68 • April 2004 • No. 4
