Dario Fo Vs. Those In Power

At 77, Italian playwright/director Dario Fo is still rabble rousing. He’s in Genoa restaging Rossini’s opera, Il Viaggio a Reims: “They discovered I had re-written some of Rossini’s text, a story about Charles X, the King of France immediately after the French revolution. He threw out the Government, called for new elections, limited the number of voters, made laws for his own benefit. Yes! Many understood him to be similar to (the Italian Prime Minister) Berlusconi! So the politicians said we could not do this opera in Genoa. It was a big struggle. In the end, the city council said to the provincial governors, ‘Sorry, the program is set, tickets have been sold, we cannot stop the production’.”