Plays 2: Can't Pay? Won't Pay! / Elizabeth / The Open Couple / An Ordinary Day

by Dario Fo, Stuart Hood (Introduction)

Dario Fo is Italy's leading contemporary playwright and performer, renowned throughout the world for his dazzling radical satires

Can't Pay Won't Pay is set in Milan, but "the problems are desperately familiar…Fo-faced farce wears a broad smile and proceeds at breathtaking speed" (Michael Coveney, Financial Times); Elizabeth "It portrays our last Tudor monarch in Fo's characteristically rollicking vein…A triumph for Gillian Hanna as translator" (Marin Hoyle, Financial Times); The Open Couple and An Ordinary Day, written with Franca Rame, deal wittily with the fate of women in a society in which both the social system in which they live and its dominant ideology are shaped by men.

Genres: Drama, Plays, Theatre

285 pages, Paperback

First published March 14, 1994

About the author

Dario Fo was an Italian satirist, playwright, theatre director, actor, and composer. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997. In 2007 he was ranked Joint Seventh with Stephen Hawking in The Telegraph's list of 100 greatest living geniuses. His dramatic work employed comedic methods of the ancient Italian commedia dell'arte, a theatrical style popular with the proletarian classes. He owned and operated a theatre company with his wife, the leading actress Franca Rame. Dario Fo died in Milan on October 13th 2016, at the age of 90.

Reviews

[Celina]

Found in a Little Free Library. Read the first play, Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! The translation is British, from the 70’s, but the text is not irrelevant to today, what with the looting and the high prices. I wouldn’t mind seeing this performed in a new translation (or the old one, with British actors).

[Chyanne Payne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very funny, but might be easier to understand by watching rather than reading.