R.I.P. Franca Rame

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Reza
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R.I.P. Franca Rame

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Franca Rame, the actress, who has died aged 83, was the wife, muse and collaborator of the Nobel-prize-winning Italian playwright Dario Fo and a formidable campaigner for feminist and radical Left-wing causes.

5:29PM BST 17 Jun 2013 London Telegraph

When Fo won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1997, many felt that Franca Rame deserved a share. Not only did she help with the writing of many of his irreverent, fantastical political satires, but she was also the leading lady in the various theatre companies they ran together.

An accomplished playwright in her own right, she wrote a series of feminist monologues, including All Home, Bed and Church (1977) ­ the title was a reference to the inferior status of Italian women, and it is now a favourite text of feminist theatre groups.

Franca Rame helped Fo write his most famous play, Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970), a work, based on a real incident, which challenged Italy’s post-war establishment by accusing the police of throwing an anarchist called Giuseppe Pinelli out of the fourth floor window of a police station and then claiming it was suicide.

When another play, Mistero Buffo (1969), a critique of Church and state and the abuses of power, was shown on television, it earned Franca Rame and Fo a reprimand from the Vatican which described it as “the most blasphemous programme ever broadcast in the history of world television”.

Fo and Franca Rame paid a heavy price for their irreverence. Banned from entering America until 1984 as political undesirables, in Italy they were, variously, assaulted, denounced, censored, arrested, jailed, banned from television and subjected to death threats. In the 1970s theatres daring to show them routinely had their licences withdrawn, while the couple could not find a landlord in Milan willing to rent them an apartment.

Most horrific of all, in March 1973 Franca Rame was kidnapped off a Milan street by far-Right militants, bundled into a military truck, then slashed with razor blades, burned with cigarette butts and brutally gang-raped, before being dumped, bleeding, in a public park.

Only two months after the assault she was back on the stage with a performance called Basta con i Fascisti (“Enough now with the Fascists”). But she was so traumatised that she did not speak to anyone about the attack for several years. In 1975 she managed to tell her husband, but only in writing. Then, in Lucca in 1978, she wrote and performed The Rape, a one-woman show in which she recounted her ordeal in harrowing detail. It was so powerful that several members of the audience fainted and Franca Rame herself was taken ill.

Many years later, in 1998, an investigating magistrate working on the terrorist outrages of the early 1970s revealed what the Fos had suspected all along: that the attack had been carried out on the orders of senior police officers infuriated by, among other things, Franca Rame’s involvement in organising a volunteer group which sent packages and provided defence lawyers to Left-wingers in custody.

There were also suggestions that the local police commander in Milan had been taking orders from his political masters, the idea being to deliver a blow against a Left-wing movement that was organising protests against the ruling Christian Democrats.

Demands for a public apology and full inquiry fell on deaf ears, however, and the instigators and perpetrators of the rape have never been punished.

Franca Rame was born at Parabiago, near Milan, on July 18 1929 into a family with a long stage tradition ­ they owned a theatre company called Family Drama. She made her theatrical debut at eight days old when she was carried on stage in her mother’s arms.

She never studied acting, but by the age of 18 had made her name in revue. Within a few years she found herself in the same company as Dario Fo, a young cabaret artiste known for his satirical skits. She recalled that on their first date Fo took her on a tour of Milanese churches. Fearing that he might be more interested in architecture than romance, she decided to take the initiative, pushed him up against a wall and “covered him in kisses”.

They married in 1954, and four years later they founded the Dario Fo and Franca Rame Company, with Fo as director and playwright and Rame as actress and administrator.

Their early plays together were gentle, absurdist satires such as Corpse for Sale (1958); The Virtuous Burglar (1958); Archangels Don’t Play Pinball (1960); and Anyone Who Robs a Foot Is Lucky in Love (1961). But their work became more political in response to the revolutionary turmoil of the late 1960s.

Rejecting conventional theatre as bourgeois, in 1968, with support from the Italian Communist Party (which Franca, though not Fo, had joined in 1967), they founded the cooperative theatre Nuova Scena and began producing more politically radical works. However, the party rapidly withdrew its support after the staging of Grand Pantomime with Flags and Small and Medium-sized Puppets, a satire on Italy’s post-war history, which featured Capitalism, portrayed as a beautiful woman, seducing Communism.

In 1970 they co-founded their own militant theatre group, La Comune, in Milan and subsequently moved into the Palazzina Liberty, a disused fruit and vegetable market that became a favourite meeting place for the Milanese Left. In 1974 Franca Rame starred in Fo’s Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! as a housewife who leads other women on a supermarket shoplifting spree. It was Fo’s first feminist play, and it inspired Franca Rame to begin to write her own sketches.

Feminism was central to much of their subsequent work together. In Medea (1977), a feminist take on the Euripides tragedy, the heroine makes a conscious choice to kill her children to throw off the yoke of a male-dominated society. An Open Couple (1982) was a reflection on the ups and downs of their own “open” marriage, exposing male double-standards about fidelity.

When Fo won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1997, he dedicated it to his wife and together they gave most of the prize money to charities working with the disabled.

In 2006 Franca Rame surprised all her friends by standing for parliament and was elected to the Italian Senate for the Italy of Values anti-corruption party. But she resigned two years later, expressing frustration with the inertia of Italy’s political system.

Franca Rame is survived by her husband and by their son, the writer Jacopo Fo.

Franca Rame, born July 18 1928, died May 29 2013
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