ABSTRACT
On 9 March 1973 Franca Rame was beaten, kidnapped, tortured with razor blades and lighted cigarettes, and raped by a group of five neofascists in Milan in a moving lorry in broad daylight. This attack led her to write the monologue Lo stupro in 1975. The monologue Lo stupro is the representation of Franca's experience condensed into three and a half pages: these must be analysed together with the performance in order to give a sense of the play. On a more personal level, she found the act unspeakable and did not wish the violence to halt her husband's theatre activities — which a rape, in her view, might have done. She effectively became a witness to the generalized violence of the day in Italy. The importance of women in a country's liberation is portrayed in many of Dario Fo and Franca's post-1970 shows.
