Dario Fo will always be “the funny mystery”

Dario Fo arrives at the Rome Film Festival 2022 in the documentary Dario Fo The Last Mistero Buffo directed by Gianluca Rame in a Clipper Media production, LUCE Cinecittà with CTFR and RAI Documentari. The entire operation benefits from the patronage of the Fo Rame Foundation.

The docufilm opens with Dario Fo’s last show, an unprecedented event as the director himself explains. A situation imbued with the memories of his extraordinary life, in which as a jester he wanted above all to give a voice to the oppressed of the world.

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The synopsis of Dario Fo’s The Last Funny Mystery

It’s August 1, 2016 in Rome, Dario Fo who is no longer just a great actor, an internationally renowned playwright, but who has already received the Nobel Prize, at the age of 90 he decides to say goodbye to the theater with a last performance, perhaps his most famous workhorse, Mistero Buffo, a revolutionary play, so much so that it ran into censorship in its early days. Today, many companies around the world represent his works or have done so. In Istanbul, Teatra Jiyana Nu (Teatro Nuova Vita) staged Clacson Trombette e Pernacchi, censored by the Turkish authorities for terrorist propaganda. In Buenos Aires, on the other hand, it is up to Muerte accidental de un ricotero to re-adapt Accidental Death of an Anarchist to the case of Walter Bulacio, murdered by the police in 1991.

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The work documents how, even today and in his absence, Dario Fo’s theater is still a starting point and a space for reflection on the human condition and on the distortions of power, capable of overcoming even linguistic differences ( he is still the inventor of Grammelot), not only geographically and culturally. The presence of Franca Rame deserves a separate mention – lifelong love and artistic Dario Fo – evidenced by their intense correspondence. This is precisely the foundation that bears their name, born in 2019 with the aim of maintaining the memory of the initiatives and activities of the two artists through cultural dissemination activities also aimed at those who have not had the opportunity to see them perform live.

Courtesy Press Office

The art of the jester that “resists” all over the world

Their art also continues through the Fo Rame Theater Company, which they founded with their son Jacopo Fo in 1989. It deals with the staging, representation and broadcasting of theater, radio, of television and cinema and deals with the organization and management of cultural activities, planning and implementation of exhibitions in many countries of the world.
The shows of Dario Fo and Franca Rame are still today among the most represented Italian works in the world and that their staging accompanies important social, economic and political demands, confirming the relevance, universality and contemporaneity of his language to and around the world.