Plays from a Marxist Perspective: Interpretations and Misinterpretations of Dario Fo

Extract

R. G. Davis directed the first commercial productions of Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist and We Won't Pay We Won't Pay!, both in Canada and the USA. In the context of the original close relevance of the plays to the political situation in Italy, he looks at how in the USA especially their force has been diluted if not extinguished by the imperative to conform to the inherent anti-communsm of American culture. R. G.Davis founded and directed the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the 1960s, and the Epic West Center for the Study of Bertolt Brecht and Epic Theatre at Berkeley in 1975. Later he returned to academia to study science and ecology, and visited Cuba to examine the culture of organic farming. He has contributed previously to New Theatre Quarterly and its predecessor, specifically on Fo in two articles for the original Theatre Quarterly: ‘Seven Anarchists I Have Known: American Approaches to Dario Fo’, in TQ 8 (1986), and ‘Dario Fo Off-Broadway: the Making of Left Culture under Adverse Conditions’, in TQ 40 (1981).