Franca Rame Research Articles

Franca Rame Won the Nobel Prize: Approaching the Works of Dario Fo and Franca Rame as Collaboration

ABSTRACT In this article, we seek to modify the view that Fo is the driving force behind the theatrical production of the various incarnations of the Compagnia Fo–Rame. We review certain theoretical aspects of authorship, emphasising it as an intrinsically collaborative process. In particular, we want to move away from the dichotomy that sees Fo as the solitary writer-actor-genius, and Rame as the ancillary manager and editor of ‘his’ works. Not only is the reality far more complex, but those roles are in fact creative authorial functions inside a collaborative practice. Why has this not been done before? In part because of a cultural practice that puts the individual (male) and his ‘genius’ at the centre, and in part because of a strong narrative put forward by Fo and Rame themselves, never truly questioned by scholars; as a consequence, Rame’s contribution has been either side-lined, or reclaimed in problematic ways.

Nella terra di mezzo: cinema e immigrazione in Italia 1990–2010 by Giancarla Vanoli

MLR, .,   homage to Franca Rame in her own staging of Mary at the Cross at the end of her play Passione. Dario Fo’s role at the origin of teatro di narrazione has been widely discussed, beginning with Simone Soriani’s  article ‘Dario Fo, il teatro di narrazione, la nuova performance epica: per una genealogia di un “quasi-genere”’, Forum Italicum ,  (), –, as well as in his  book Sulla scena del racconto (Genoa: Zona). Nor is the function of Fo’s relationship with the audience new, having been investigated by Scuderi himself in several articles and books. Rather, the original contribution of this collection is that it both looks back at the roots of Fo’s theatrical activity and looks forward by discussing his legacy as a consummate playwright and performer. Will the theatre of Dario Fo and Franca Rame—its political engagement and popular roots—maintain its relevance even aer their death? e essays contained in this volume indicate that it will. U  A D C Nella terra di mezzo: cinema e immigrazione in Italia –. By G V. (Linee) Milan: Meltemi. .  pp. €. ISBN ––– –. In her insightful study, Giancarla Vanoli sets out to investigate the fertile intersection between Italian cinema and the theme of immigration from  to , years in which the style and format of immigration films were first shaped. While this study follows the lines of previous Italian essays such as Sonia Cincinelli’s Senza frontiere (Rome: Kappa, ) and Angela Bianca Saponari’s Il corpo esiliato (Bari: Progedit, ), Vanoli’s work is original in demonstrating how Italian immigration cinema has worked as a ‘grande specchio dell’identità nazionale’ (p. ), while reviving the debate on authorship and genre in the Italian context. e volume includes a short Introduction, three chapters, closing remarks, and a useful appendix referencing major Italian films about immigration, about half of which are directly analysed by the author throughout the book. Chapter  provides a detailed analysis of the state of Italian cinema in the early s, investigating its turbulent evolution across the big and the small screen, in the rising years of Berlusconi’s Mediaset and at times of scarce public funding for the film industry. Vanoli highlights that, while television has played an important role in spreading xenophobic and populist attitudes towards immigrants, numerous film-makers have used the medium of cinema to convey solidarity with them. However, an appearance of support which in reality belittles the migrant characters is already identified in films such as Pirani’s L’appartamento (). In fact, the author clearly underlines how films about immigration, which was then—and remains today—one of the most divisive issues in Italian society, struggle to offer nuanced portraits of migrant subjects, and oen fall into the trap of buonismo. In the second chapter Vanoli examines the entanglements between immigration films and two strongholds of Italian cinema: author and genre. Analysing the works of De Seta, Bertolucci, and Olmi—the venerati maestri—she concludes that their  Reviews authoritative position in the Italian landscape does not exclude them from a paternalistic approach to narrating the story of the migrant, a clear example of which is identified by the author in the ending of De Seta’s Lettere dal Sahara (). Similar risks are highlighted in the production of the in-between generation of film-makers, particularly in the indulgent Western gaze cast in two major dramas, Amelio’s Lamerica () and Giordana’s Quando sei nato non puoi più nasconderti (). Such risks seem to be avoided with the third generation of registi, such as Garrone and Manetti Bros., who are seen as postmodern, globalized authors able to offer a less hierarchical vision of the interaction between Italians and immigrants, as in the metanarrative of Terra di mezzo () or in the moves towards accented cinema in Torino Boys (). e third chapter concludes the analysis on genre in immigration cinema from the early s, arguing that the theme of migration brings new life both into the tradition of documentary—a notable example being Come un uomo sulla terra by Biadene, Segre, and Yimer ()—and in the resurgence of comedy with works such as Comencini’s Bianco e nero (). At the same time, the author...

La scrittura e i linguaggi nel teatro di Dario Fo e Franca Rame

Dario Fo e Franca Rame sono stati i teatrologhi italiani più riconosciuti della seconda metàdel Novecento, famosi per la loro arte popolare e impegnata, che intendeva far riflettere – e,di conseguenza, emancipare – attraverso la comicità. Questo lavoro pretende discorrere sulloro processo creativo e la conseguente scrittura dei testi teatrali, a partire principalmentedalla lettura della tesi di Maria Teresa Pizza, intitolata "Al Lavoro com Dario Fo e FrancaRame: Genesi e composizione dell’Opera Teatrale." Per il caso di Fo, la creazione risultaindissociabile dal ludico e dalla quotidianità, l'esperienza creativa è un continuum non solotemporale, ma anche spaziale e transmediale. Nel caso di Rame, invece, la creazione si basasu una particolare sensibilità al ritmo della scena e un’ottima capacità di improvvisazione,alla quale segue un lavoro continuo di rielaborazione e perfezionamento dell’opera, il qualeha dato origine non solo alle numerose pubblicazioni della coppia, ma anche ad un archivioon-line con oltre 5 milioni di documenti sulle loro opere, nel rispetto della molteplicità deilinguaggi coinvolti sia nella creazione che nella realizzazione di ogni loro testo.

LA RECEPCIÓN DEL TEATRO DE FRANCA RAME EN ESPAÑA

En este artículo se pretende estudiar la recepción de la obra y delas representaciones de Franca Rame en España durante los añosochenta y noventa. Fuentes del estudio las constituyen reseñas,artículos, reportajes y entrevistas publicadas en España en esteperiodo a raíz de espectáculos de los que Rame es autora. Setendrán en consideración fundamentalmente los aspectos teatralesde su producción, pero sin dejar al margen las consideracionespolíticas y morales que de ella derivan.

A Stage of Her Own? ‘Michele Lu Lanzone’ as Blueprint for Franca Rame’s Emancipation

ABSTRACTThis article addresses L’operaio conosce 300 parole, il padrone 1000, per questo lui è il padrone (1969), one of the first plays produced by the couple Dario Fo and Franca Rame after their rupture with the mainstream bourgeois theatrical circuit. Through a close reading of one section of the play – the monologue ‘Michele lu Lanzone’ – we trace the beginnings of a process of re-negotiation of Rame’s role within their professional relationship. We argue that the monologue both represents and plays out a series of tensions around ideological, artistic and gender issues, thus ‘othering’ the female protagonist from the rest of the piece and its didactic message. We also show how the complex intersections of discourses and agendas that constitute the tension within L’operaio are in fact the ongoing context in which Rame will ‘find her own voice’, gaining independence without ever abandoning the partnership.

Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames: Rewriting Tragedy 1970–2005 by Eleftheria Ioannidou

Reviewed by: Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames: Rewriting Tragedy 1970–2005 by Eleftheria Ioannidou Margherita Laera Eleftheria Ioannidou. Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames: Rewriting Tragedy 1970–2005. Classical Presences Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2017. xii + 240 pp. Cloth, $95. Eleftheria Ioannidou's first monograph is a welcome addition to classical reception studies from a scholar equally embedded in the disciplines of classics and theatre and performance studies, whose level of expertise and fluency in both academic fields and several European languages is remarkable. The volume examines the relationship between the notion of tragedy and postmodern theory and aesthetics through an analysis of a series of plays which rewrite ancient dramatic material. In the past few decades, the debate about contemporary theatrical adaptations of Greek tragedy in western drama has been dominated by classical scholars based at, or associated with, the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) research centre at the University of Oxford, founded by Edith Hall and Oliver Taplin in 1996; Ioannidou is currently an Early-Career Associate member, despite being based in the Netherlands as a Lecturer in Theatre. Publications from the international pool of eminent, mid- and early-career APGRD scholars have flooded the market since the year 2000, notably with volumes such as Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Amanda Wrigley's edited collection Dionysus Since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium (2004). The present study emerged as a doctoral thesis supervised at Oxford by the now Director of APGRD, Fiona Macintosh, and operates within the same territory of Dionysus Since 69; it dissects western playwrights' re-imaginings of Athenian tragedy from the 1970s to the early years of the 21st century, but Ioannidou's point of departure is narrower in focus. In line with her colleagues at APGRD, however, she privileges textual analysis over a theorization of performance, despite the word "performance" being in the title of the research centre. Greek Fragments in Postmodern Frames takes its cue from Terry Eagleton's position, articulated in Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (2003), that postmodernism and its inherent conservatism is incompatible with tragedy as a genre, aesthetic category and structure of feeling because "if human beings are fragments, they are not even coherent enough to be the bearers of tragic meaning" (Eagleton quoted in Ioannidou, 2). Relying on and extending Raymond Williams' historical materialism in Modern Tragedy (1966), Ioannidou's project is therefore to show how tragedy is "not a single and permanent kind of fact, but a series of experiences, conventions and institutions" (Williams quoted in Ioannidou, 25) [End Page 373] that can be adapted to suit different historical periods and literary movements, including postmodernism. The overarching argument proposed by Ioannidou is that the prevalent postmodern gesture is to "undo" Greek texts in order to question the "system of exclusions or oppression that have been inscribed in them within a long history of reception" (4). She continues: "Greek tragedy itself is subjected to critique both as a category used to legitimize acts of retribution as well as a dramatic form that epitomizes the historical paradigm of the Western world, not least in its failings and discontents" (4). After a discussion of the modern critical debate on tragedy—from Nietzsche to Steiner, Brecht, Benjamin, Williams, Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Eagleton, Maffessoli—Ioannidou proceeds to examine three plays that "propose a new ethics of appropriation of the canon" and "introduce a politics of viewing that transposes the ethical question into the process of reception" (71); namely Steven Berkoff's Greek (1994), Hélène Cixous's La ville parjure (1994) and Martin Crimp's Cruel and Tender (2004). According to Ioannidou, these plays "break with tragedy as a category that reaffirms aesthetic hierarchies and cultural hegemonies and invite audiences to reflect on the ways in which suffering is mediated, contained, and evaluated" (71). Ioannidou then turns to investigate how postmodern tragedies engage with metatheatre, with reference to Pavlos Matesis' Roar (1998), Andreas Staïkos' Clytemnestra? (1975), Brian Friel's Living Quarters: After Hippolytus (1977), Athol Fugard's The Island (1973), and Dario Fo and Franca Rame's La Medea (1977). Here, Ioannidou contends that rewritings by Matesis...

“Loro parlano da sole”. Silenzio, dialogo e polifonia in “Una donna sola” di Franca Rame come forma di querelle des femmes

The protagonist of “Una donna sola” is a housewife who keeps a monologue with herself and with several invisible people outside the stage. As the plot develops different types of dialogic relationships and verbal interactions are introduced in the story. The protagonist, through her mono-dialogue, moves from a state of unconsciousness to one of awareness, from a passive victim to an active subject. Her character is the “crazy” woman who shows uncomfortable truths. The deliberate staging of the subordinate role of women becomes a form of Querelle. On the one hand Franca Rame denounces violence and male authoritarianism, on the other hand she proposes the deconstruction and reconstruction of female identities.

Tradução, dramaturgia e ética: o caso das traduções brasileiras de Tutta casa, letto e chiesa, de Franca Rame e Dario Fo


 
 
 Este artigo analisa as traduções brasileiras às quais foi possível ter acesso dos monólogos de Tutta casa, letto e chiesa, de Dario Fo e Franca Rame, em parti- cular dos monólogos O despertar e Uma mulher sozinha, traduzidos por Roberto Vignati e Michele Piccoli para a montagem intitulada Brincando em cima daquilo, que teve direção do primeiro, atuação de Marília Pêra e estreia provável também em 1983, no Rio de Janeiro. Neste trabalho, explora-se a re- lação entre dramaturgia e escolhas tradutórias, levando em consideração a ética dos tradutores, pensada a partir da concepção de Spivak, segundo quem é preciso ter responsabilidade ao traduzir um texto considerado subalterno. Chega-se à conclusão de que esta tradução brasileira não oferece plena hos- pitalidade estética e política ao texto italiano, o que influencia uma recepção posterior mais focada no humor e menos no tom de denúncia e contestação presente no texto de partida.
 
 

Marco Paolini’s Theatre of Trauma: Vajont

This paper analyzes the work of actor/writer Marco Paolini, and his acclaimed monologue Il racconto del Vajont in particular. In the wake of Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s teatro civile, Paolini’s monolo­gues contributed to the birth of the so-called teatro di narrazione in the 1990s, which can also be defined as “theatre of trauma”, that is, a the­atre that recovers the memory of tragic events from the past. In recent times, trauma has become a central theme of Western narrative, poli­tics, and other forms of representation in the public sphere. Following the thought of philosophers such as Jean-François Lyotard and Slavoj Zižek, the article reads Paolini’s Il racconto del Vajont as a significant example of what writer Kyo Maclear calls “witness art.” Characterized by a crisis of the traditional models of representation in mainstream culture, witness art is conceived by Maclear in opposition to the tradi­tional divisions between art, knowledge, and the political instances of public discourse. Among Paolini’s many performances of Vaiont, the one performed at the same time and place where the tragedy took place 34 years before, and broadcasted live on RAI 2 in 1997, stands out for its uniqueness. That night, Paolini evoked the reenactment of a trau­matic experience by its witnesses, and, on a wider scale, by the audien­ce watching television at home. An almost forgotten tragedy became a media event, and for the first time trauma witnessing as such—and not as a means for a specific political claim—became part of the public discourse in the elaboration of post-1989 Italy.

The Lasting Theatre of Dario Fo and Franca Rame

The Lasting Theatre of Dario Fo and Franca Rame

‘An Old Man Emanating Kindness’: Dario Fo at ISTA, 1996

In 1996 the Polish theatre scholar Juliusz Tyszka was present at the gathering of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) in Copenhagen. Here, Dario Fo – in company with his wife and theatrical partner Franca Rame, also a contributor – was among the few invited to participate in both sessions of the conference: ‘Performers’ Bios: Whispering Winds of Theatre and Dance’ and ‘Theatre in a Multicultural Society’. Though already seventy years old and still in recovery from a recent stroke, Fo was incapable of confining himself to a conventional lecture, but (against his doctor's advice) combined his talk with performing the points he was making, whether imitating the curves of a voluptuous girl or enacting a speech in his universal ‘language’ of ‘gramelot’. He was to live on for another twenty years before his death at the age of ninety on 13 October 2016, outliving Franca Rame by just three years. Juliusz Tyszka, an advisory editor of NTQ and a regular contributor to the journal, is head of the Unit of Performance Studies, Institute of Cultural Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University at Poznań, Poland.

Nicoletta Marini-Maio and Colleen Ryan-Scheutz (eds) (2008). Set the Stage! Teaching Italian through Theater.

Set the Stage! Teaching Italian through Theater: Theories, Methods, and Practices (Yale, 2008), edited by Nicoletta Marini-Maio and Colleen Ryan-Scheutz, is a tremendously valuable contribution to the growing body of literature on drama and theatre in foreign/second language (L2) education. This volume contains eleven chapters addressing a diverse array of topics, a comprehensive director’s handbook, and reflective contributions by Dario Fo, Franca Rame and Dacia Maraini, three of Italy’s most prominent theatre practitioners engaged with pedagogical questions related to the learning of L2 Italian through theatre. The chapters of Set the Stage! encompass both theoretical and practical orientations toward questions of culture, theatre history, curriculum, and assessment in language learning, and they offer an array of perspectives that illuminate a variety of possible models for incorporating diverse forms of theatre within the L2 curriculum. The first section of Set the Stage! includes an overview of theatre’s place within Italian literature and culture. Following Pietro Frassica’s overview of the Italian theatrical canon, William Van Watson offers an insightful commentary on the inherent theatricality of Italian cultural interactions, the possibilities this raises for cultural misunderstandings, and the concomitant potential it holds for theatrically teachable moments. Section II focuses on the place of ...

Staging Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Anglo-American Approaches to Political Theatre, by Stefania Taviano

Staging Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Anglo-American Approaches to Political Theatre, by Stefania Taviano

Staging Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Anglo-American Approaches to Political Theatre (review)

Staging Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Anglo-American Approaches to Political Theatre (review)

Staging Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Anglo-American Approaches to Political Theatre (review)

Reviewed by: Staging Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Anglo-American Approaches to Political Theatre Joseph Farrell Staging Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Anglo-American Approaches to Political Theatre, by Stefania Taviano. Pp. 136. Ashgate, 2006. Hb. £40. Luigi Pirandello, one of Dario Fo's predecessors in Italian theatre, was given to worrying obsessively about the single or multiple nature of human personality, and about a related clash between 'the face and the mask', a clash which was not a dispute between an inauthentic mask placed over an authentic but concealed face, but a more subtle process whereby each successive mask-over-mask had equal claim to authenticity, or inauthenticity, while the face was unknowable. Fo operates in a different intellectual tradition and owes little to Pirandello, but it may [End Page 129] be that these Pirandellian formulae are the most apt metaphors for the varied, seemingly incompatible, Fos known to theatre-goers and critics in different countries. It is continually repeated that Fo is the most frequently performed of all living playwrights, so it can hardly be expected, especially granted the political nature of his playwriting, that the Fo who fills theatres in Milan can be the one appreciated in Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, or Colombo. Stefania Taviano, who now teaches in Sicily but who previously worked in both Britain and North America, has tackled this question with an insightful, splendidly researched study of Fo's reception in two English-speaking countries. She deals firstly with abstract critical debates on the process of transferring theatre from one culture to another, and secondly with the question of defining 'political theatre' in a philosophical environment marked by postmodernism before offering case-by-case studies of the translation and staging of the few works by Fo known to theatres in Britain and the USA. Her chapters on Fo in America are by far the best, perhaps because her knowledge of staging Fo there was gained at first hand, so that while she quotes widely from American periodicals, as she does in regard to England and Scotland, she also has access to more immediate information and is less reliant on the subjective reactions of reviewers. No doubt the contemporary requirements of academic publishing compelled her to open with a 'theoretical' discourse, but once she has complied with these demands, she leaves 'theory' and its jargon aside in favour of detailed analyses of specific productions. She refers,for instance, to Hal Foster's distinction between 'transgressive' and 'resistant' politics in theatre, and writes that 'postmodernism has shown that such transgression is impossible since no cultural action can go beyond the context in which it was produced'. This is dubious and hardly the point, since Bertolt Brecht and G. B. Shaw as well as Dario Fo have written plays which can be called political and whose purpose was not to question the 'context' but to challenge prevailing values, ethics, and ideology. The assertion sits uneasily with the body of the book, where Taviano's well-founded premise is that there is indeed a genre of theatre which can be called 'political', and that most companies in the UK and USA have made a pig's ear of presenting to their audiences the political theatre created by Fo. Taviano is uncertain too over whether the fact that there has emerged a British Fo, separate from the Italian Fo, and consequently presented in terms of British theatre history, is an inescapable consequence of the very process of cultural and linguistic transfer, a deplorable act of insouciance on the part of theatrical world, or a sign of the sheer [End Page 130] exuberance of Fo's creative vitality. She quotes the late David Hirst as saying that the Fo presented to audiences in Britain is a 'distortion', and seems to incline to that view herself, but also cites the postmodern thinking that would see every translation not as a linguistic transposition but as a deeper switch between cultures, from source culture to target culture. This is the crux of the matter. If the transfer madeis indeed so deep as to amount to 'appropriation', it may well be that we have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that...

Metatheatre and Character Dynamics in The Two-Headed Anomaly by Dario Fo

Dario Fo has developed his own brand of epic theatre by adapting principles and techniques from various forms of popular performance and the oral tradition. He stays detached from the role he plays by frequently shifting in and out of character and by calling attention to the performance as such. This, argues Antonio Scuderi, allows him to emphasize the interpretive frame – the ‘messages’ he establishes in his prologue. His most recent play, The Two-Headed Anomaly, is thus at one level a farcical romp; but a closer look reveals an intricate metatheatrical structure that allows Dario Fo and his fellow-performer Franca Rame to deliver their political satire. Antonio Scuderi is Associate Professor of Italian at Truman State University in Missouri. He is the author of Dario Fo and Popular Performance (Legas, 1998) and with Joseph Farrell edited Dario Fo: Stage, Text and Tradition (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000). His most recent articles on Fo have appeared in Theatre Journal (2003) and Modern Language Review (2004).

Madness in the Theater of Dario Fo and Franca Rame

This article traces the origins of madness in Dario Fo and Franca Rame's theatre both as a theatrical device and as a genuine illness. It identifies the main traits and differences of madmen and madwomen and where these originate in the Italian socio-political climate from the Sixties to the Nineties. Finally, it outlines(?) the importance of gender in relation to madness and its uses in the Fos' theatre.

Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Artful Laughter. By Ron Jenkins. New York: Aperture, 2001; pp. 211. $45.00 hardcover

From the first glance, this is a beautiful book. Its cover is provocative, offering the image of Dario Fo's face stretched across the spine of the book, seemingly held in place by buckles and cables that extend across the front and back cover. The inside of the book contains one stunning presentation after another, including a wide variety of photographs of Dario Fo and Franca Rame in performance or at work, as well as drawings and paintings by Fo himself, paintings by the great masters Leonardo da Vinci and Jacapo Tintoretto as interpreted by Fo, and others by Piero della Francesca and Giotto as altered in Fo's adaptations. Moreover, the layout of the text is beautifully designed. The staff of Aperture, and particularly Yolanda Cuomo, the book's designer, have executed its presentation masterfully.

Dario Fo & Franca Rame: artful laughter

Dario Fo & Franca Rame: artful laughter

Franca Rame, A Woman on Stage

Franca Rame, A Woman on Stage