The Tricks of the Trade

Description

Throughout the 1980s, Dario Fo, Italy's best known and most provocative satirical playwright, and his wife Franca Rame, the celebrated actress and feminist, conducted a series of performance-seminars around the world on the subject of acting. In places as diverse as London's Riverside Studios, Rome's Teatro Argentina and Perugia's Free University of Alcatraz, Fo and Rame have revealed to rapt audiences the many facets of the actor's art - his or her 'Tricks of the Trade'. Tracing the life of the comic performer back to the itinerant jongleur and the skillful improvisations of later commedia dell'arte troupes, Fo's genius as both a player and synthesiser of the historical past allows him to resurrect before our eyes and ears a shadow performer upon whom all actors unwittingly base their work. Using mime, masks, pieces of text, dance, action and snatches from songs, Fo and Franca Rame consolidate many months of their lecture demonstrations into a 'Six Day' workshop, a staged demonstration that is also a Fo-on-Fo one-man show. It is released to coincide with the paperback release of Dario Fo's autobiography "My First Seven Years Plus a Few More".

For over thrity years Dario Fo, oftern in collaboration with his wife Franca Rame, has led the field in political satire in Europe. Outside Italy, Fo's comedies are often adapted to reflect local political conditions, but the essence remains the same. Capitalism, imperialism and corruption within government are typical targets for hilarious, ideologically-inspired attacks on the establishment. Drawing on all forms of popular theatre, Fo's international reputation as an actor, mime and director equals that of his writing. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997. Joseph Farrell is Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Strathclyde. He has written on and translated Italian theatre widely. He is theatre reviewer for The Scotsman, as well as the author of Dario Fo and France Rame: Harlequins of the Revolution (Methuen, 2001), and has edited A History of Italian Theatre (CUP, 2006) as well as Methuen Student editions of Six Characters in Search of an Author and Accidental Death of an Anarchist.

"'A scintillating compendium, erudite and refreshing...' Observer * '...an angular, uncomfortable, disquieting aid inspirational account of an art in which there are no more universal performers and recorders than Dario Fo and Franca Rame' Independent * 'Fo's work is brimful with dialect, with harsh humour, with the wit of the bar-room racounteur...' Guardian"