Call it what you like but it is a lot like fascism

Call it what you like, but it is a lot like fascism”.A tall man, with a lively and humorous face, Fo has lost none of his energy, nor his convictions, despite a stroke a few years ago. New causes, such as genetic engineering, have emerged for him to take a stand againstand old ones have resurfaced. He remains as passionate and prolific as ever, writing, producing, designing sets and costumes, drawing and painting.I met him at his summer home a few miles outside the Adriatic holiday resort of Casernatico. It is a nice house, in a suburban street with a swimming pool in the garden, but it is not the picturesque writer’s retreat you might expect forone of the most performed playwrights in the world. In the midsummer heat, flies from the local farms are a perpetual problem.When the station-master’s son from the northern Italian lakes was offered the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997, some hoped he would refuse it.

Instead Fo celebrated with champagne and used the money to set up a foundation for disabled people. For their art and beliefs, Fo and his actress wife, co-star and collaborator of nearly 50 years, Franca Rame, who is as famous in Italy as Fo is, have suffered censorship, police intimidation, arrest, and, in the case of Rame, gang rape and mutilation while on her way to the hairdressers. It is now accepted that Rame’s rapists 28 years ago were fascist militants backed by members of the military police.Fo is not afraid to say what many on the left in Italy believe about the recent bombings (but dare not say for fear of appearing complicit), namely that they were planted and then made to look like the work of a revived Red Brigade, a violent extreme-left group of the 1970s.”The Venice bomb was a classic made to look like the same kind of bombs of the anarchists of years past. The judges in Genoa and Venice said no way it could be perpetuated by the same people. I know one of the judges personally, and he was right: it was a professional job and who is more professional at this than the police themselves who know how to use timers, who know how to use detonators? When there aren’t real scapegoats then you have to create them. That went on in the Seventies and is still going on, because it actually creates a crazy reaction that isn’t political – that of the concept of the armed struggle.”It is easy to see why Fo might believe this.

Accidental Death of an Anarchist dealt with a true event of a certain Pino Pinelli who inexplicably fell to his death in 1969 from the upper story of the police headquarters in Milan. At that time Pinelli was being investigated about a fatal bombing that Fo believed was planted by the intelligence services.But there is a lot more in Fo’s work, which includes about 75 plays, than just bombs and dead anarchists.Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay, a play whose title inspired the anti-poll tax movement in Britain, was about the effects of inflation on working people. As the Nobel Prize citation said of Fo, he “emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden”. He is sympathetic to the ideals of the anti-globalisation movement and says he would like to write something about Genoa.”I agree with a lot of what the movement is about. I’m against things like factories being sold off in Europe, by people who then exploit children in Africa and other poor parts of the world, to pay them a fifth of what they would pay a worker in Europe.

It’s organised trade robbery.” He even gets passionate about plans to increase the speed limit in Italy. “They want to raise the speed limit to 170km per hour on the motorway when here in Italy we have 50 deaths on the road a day, one of the highest death rates in the world It will be a massacre. All that for the economy, to sell things, because fast cars cost more.”. Where do tennis stars belong … socially? In Datchet or Cobham I’d say – and their upstate New York equivalents and everywhere that looks like that across the world. They’ll fit in nicely in any haute suburb with manicured lawns

Where do tennis stars belong … socially? In Datchet or Cobham I’d say – and their upstate New York equivalents and everywhere that looks like that across the world.

They’ll fit in nicely in any haute suburb with manicured lawns.
Tennis stars are terminally dull, especially when they fit themselves up with a personality And tennis wives are like 1970s rock star wives. When you get to a certain level in tennis, they must simply send you one as part of the contract. But – or is it just me losing my usual forensic grip – isn’t the veteran’s circuit quite fun in a mild way – Henri Leconte and Jimmy Connors. Isn’t Ilie Nastase a bit interesting? Not just Iron Curtain with long hair Perhaps I’m confusing him with Roman Polanski. In my mind’s eye Nastase was part of the Drones secondary bankers’ fun set of the early 1970s I could be wrong Very possibly he’s not interesting at all. I’m sorry I started this now.Saga want Nastase for a sunbeam, as an example of how we all get fat and well-behaved and a decent insurance risk after 50.”I used to be a bad boy,” he says to camera, looking plump.