Dario Fo's theatre has had a deep impact on Scotland – and he deserves recognition

As actor-author he was deeply embedded in the theatrical traditions of Italy and some of his best known works were written in response to specific events in Italian public and political life, but his style of theatre connected with the Scottish theatre-going public, more strongly than with similar audiences down south. Perhaps the attraction lay in that element of joyous farce allied to protests against authority and injustice. Maybe it was the fact that his satirical derision was the bark of the underdog, and thus in keeping with comedy as Rikki Fulton and Jack Milroy, more gently, purveyed it. In addition, Scottish actors like Andy Gray relished the physical style of acting which Fo’s theatre encouraged and required. It is a pity that his earlier plays from the sixties were never produced here, because they used music and song and the parallels with a Scottish music-hall tradition would have been more apparent.

A large part of the credit for Fo’s success in Scotland must go to one company, Borderline, and one director, Morag Fullarton, who had the insight and skill to combine the two supposedly jarring but central elements – uproarious farce and political commitment. From there, Fo’s influence spread. He himself saw Fullarton’s production of his Trumpets and Raspberries when visiting the Edinburgh Festival, and stated that it was one of the few productions which had got the tone and approach right. A couple of years ago, the National Theatre of Scotland put on Yer Granny, an Argentinian work radically adapted by Douglas Maxwell, who said in the programme that his approach was inspired by his memory of Borderline’s productions of Fo’s work. The director of the play was Graham McLaren, now artistic director of the Abbey in Dublin, and another who openly acknowledges his debt to Fo.

The encounter was not always so harmonious. There was one occasion in Scotland when a director and lead actor requested permission to “workshop” Accidental Death of an Anarchist as part of their pre-production rehearsals. The verb “to workshop” is an ambiguous one with no agreed meaning but permission could hardly be withheld. They came out with a radically rewritten version, altering the direction of the play, playing up the farce and downplaying the politics and underlying tragedy. Their added jokes may have had them rolling about in the rehearsal room but they fell flat with other readers.

As it happened, Fo was due in Edinburgh that summer to appear at the Book Festival to launch my translation of his autobiography, My First Seven Years (Plus a Few More), and a meeting was arranged with the producer. The conversation was cordial, because Fo was not given to displays of arrogant outrage, and the producer was happy to take on board his points about the balance of the play and its inspiration as a response to a neo-fascist bombing outrage in Milan in 1969. Most of the characters were based on specific individuals in positions of power who had been responsible for a cover-up which falsely alleged that the perpetrators were members of anarchist cells. The madman who conducts the counter-inquiry, originally played by Fo himself, was the only purely invented character. He added that from the various productions he had seen in different countries, the most successful were those which adhered most closely to the original text. The production went ahead respecting that approach.

Acccidental Death became the international protest play, and in spite of its roots in one incident in recent Italian history it transmogrified into a vehicle for anger against oppression everywhere. I went once to Fo’s house in Milan to discover him in hesitant conversation with a small group of actors from Sri Lanka. They had no Italian and he could speak only a few words of English. What they wanted to tell him was that they had been staging Accidental Death and were grateful to him for that play. The Sri Lankans said they had not adapted the drama or changed the setting, but that the work spoke to them of the behaviour of the authorities at a time when civil war was raging.

BOTH Dario and Franca Rame, his actress wife who was co-author of many of the works produced by the couple, were frequent visitors to the Edinburgh Festival, and made a point of going to see what had been made of their work on the Fringe. Having one or other in the audience can be a daunting experience for directors or performers. Dario himself was unlikely to be overtly dismissive in public, but Franca could be much more cutting. At times, her recognition of shortcomings in parts she had previously performed herself took the form of an offer of private rehearsal sessions, but on other occasions she was liable to rise majestically to her feet to issue loud and uncompromising denunciations. Once, a young student actress from England was reduced to tears when her performance as Almost by Chance a Woman, Elizabeth, in an admittedly appalling production, drew audible comments of “vergogna” from Franca at the interval. There was no need of a command of Italian to grasp the sense.

Other experiences were more arresting. In 1986, Franca returned with a programme consisting of Open Couple and the monologues, Medea and The Rape. Although not performing himself, Dario accompanied her and took in various shows, including Tilda Swinton at the Traverse in a monologue – Man to Man by Manfred Karge – where she played a woman who disguises herself as her dead husband to work as a crane driver. Fo did not speak English, but came out in a state of excitement, fired by enthusiasm for an idea which had occurred to him while watching. Creativity is a mysterious phenomenon, and his listeners at a party that evening could not detect any connection between his ideas and the play which had seemingly generated it. Suppose there is a woman in a flat, he said, making a video as her last testament to her worthless ex-husband before killing herself, but she is continually interrupted by phone calls from other women who are experiencing problems and undergoing suffering much like hers. Why would they be phoning, he wondered? A wrong number, obviously, but whose? By the following morning, the idea was even clearer, and over breakfast he began to write out notes. He had no paper and wrote furiously on napkins, talking as he wrote, the emerging script spilling off the napkins onto the white tablecloth. The management was magnanimous towards the demands of inspiration. Fo left Edinburgh for Milan on a Friday, and phoned on Monday to say that the play, now entitled An Ordinary Day, was fully written. It was later produced by Borderline with Juliet Cadzow in the lead role.

Fo was pleased with his status as an international disturber of the peace. His impact on the theatre and political movements in other countries came from their ability to find parallels with the situation in his polemical comedies, not from his direct involvement in their activities, or struggles. It has often been said that Dario Fo was the most translated and performed world-wide of modern playwrights, and he gained a status as a public menace in several countries. In 2016, when Erdogan assumed dictatorial powers in Turkey after the failed coup against him, he issued to theatres a list of banned playwrights including Shakespeare, Chekhov and Brecht, with Dario Fo as the only living writer on the list. Fo was delighted. “It’s like winning a second Nobel prize,” he announced. His political impact on Britain was more muted. The translated title of one of his best known plays, Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay, provided the slogan for demonstrators against Mrs Thatcher’s poll tax, but for the most part his influence was restricted to theatre practice,

The final act of homage from Scotland to Fo should have occurred in October 2016, when to celebrate his 90th birthday, a Fo-Fest was organised in Edinburgh to include talks and seminars, the first exhibition of his paintings in the UK and a personal appearance at the Lyceum for a discussion on theatre based on a recent book, New Tricks of the Trade. Unfortunately, a deterioration in his health meant that travel was impossible, and he died while the event, in a much reduced format, went ahead. He merits recognition in Scotland.