ABSTRACT
In 1940 Dario Fo went to Milan to study painting and later enrolled in the Architecture School of the Polytechnic Institute, stopping some way short of completing his degree. He already had an amateur interest in theatre, but did not begin professional consideration of its possibilities until he was 25. Although scathing of academicism, as indeed he still is, he was aware of the need to construct for himself a research base, a footing in the past on which to raise the walls of a contemporary performance. He felt the same standards ought to exist in popular theatre as in the popular architecture he had been studying. Simple churches, built by their congregation from locally quarried stone, did not need the intervention of architects to achieve an expressive functionality, especially in creating levels and acoustic chambers appropriate to the rituals and dramatic enactments of the Mass. His quest started in the same era as those pre-Renaissance churches:
I started with medieval theatre because it has always been regarded as a second-rate art form, whilst at the same time being plundered for ideas. On the one hand there was great poetry, and on the other there was minor, second-rate literature which was treated as second-rate theatre. But without the influence of the street poets, Dante could not have had such worthwhile material to work on. In De vulgari eloquentia, his research into popular speech, he shows that without this investigation, without knowing what was happening at street level, Dante couldn’t have achieved such great poetry. 1
