Dario FoEdition 1

For three decades Dario Fo has been the world's most performed living playwright and Europe's leading radical dramatist. He was awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize for Literature at the age of 71 for his contributions as a writer, actor and mime artist over half a century. A controversial figure, he has also been a communist for most of his life.

In the first political biography of Dario Fo, Tom Behan traces Fo's life and work from his beginnings in cabaret and mime in postwar Italy and his early writings for television and radio, to the development of his political ideas and the influence of his plays both inside and outside Italy.

Behan broadens his study to examine the importance of Fo's theatre and explores the relationship between mass leftwing movements and Fo's activities as playwright and performer. To illustrate these links, Behan makes a detailed analysis of the key themes in Fo's plays – state repression in The Accidental Death of an Anarchist, rebellion in Can't Pay, Won't Pay, the tragedy of leftwing terrorism in Trumpets and Raspberries, and the anti-Clerical satire of Mistero Buffo .