Dario Fo

Dario Fo was born in northern Italy on 24 March 1926 and built a career retrieving the "illegitimate" theatre of wandering medieval players and commedia dell'arte, turning ancient forms into weapons against power. Through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s his plays attacked assassinations, corruption, organised crime, racism, Catholic theology and war; in the 1990s and 2000s he turned his sights on Silvio Berlusconi and Forza Italia, then the banks during the European debt crisis. His solo piece Mistero Buffo toured Europe, Asia, Canada and Latin America for thirty years and became one of the most controversial spectacles in postwar European theatre - Cardinal Ugo Poletti denounced it as "the most blasphemous show in the history of television". The Swedish Academy awarded him the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature for emulating jesters "in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden", cementing his place as a major figure in twentieth-century world theatre. His plays were translated into thirty languages and performed from Argentina to South Korea. He died on 13 October 2016.