Dario Fo and His Interpreters on Stage: a play within the play

In an interview to Il Giorno about his 1986 tour with Franca Rame in the USA, Dario Fo stated that he considered himself lucky not to speak English. Nowadays, in a time when English has become the world lingua franca, such a statement might appear absurd, but there are a number of reasons why Fo’s inability to speak the language of his host country was not an obstacle in presenting his work to American audiences, and became an advantage instead. First of all the nature of Fo’s language, and in particular of Mistero Buffo, the work that he often performs abroad and that he performed for his USA spectators. Mistero Buffo is his most successful one-man show and incorporates different pieces, all in grammelot, an onomatopoeic language based on various dialects from the north of Italy, including also some Spanish, English and French words. Each piece in Mistero Buffo is preceded by a prologue, in which Fo creates a direct dialogue with his audience and explains the story that he will be interpreting. During the prologue Fo is usually accompanied by an on stage translator, whereas supertitles are displayed during the performance itself. The onomatopoeic nature of the grammelot, combined with Fo’s body language, allows to reduce the function of the supertitles to a minimum, that is to say translating the central concepts and jokes, rather than rendering every single sentence. Furthermore, having been introduced to the main aspects of each piece of Mistero Buffo that Fo will perform, theater-goers do not need to pay so much attention to the text, the latter becomes secondary to Fo’s kinetic language which makes his show accessible to people of all cultures and nationalities.