Unreviewable?
It is actually not easy –even for a professional journalist - to find words or create a coherent structure to describe the stunning performance the capacity audience at The Gregson was treated to on this occasion. I have already described the Nobel Laureate's wicked piece (read the preview below), and those who have seen Venturino's previous performances both here in Lancaster at The Gregson and elsewhere will be familiar with his mercurial delivery, his physical agility and relentless physical and emotional energy.

Indeed just watching him is physically and emotionally draining. If it is difficult for me or, dare I say, anyone else, to put this into words, perhaps one explanation is that most is his one-man, non-stop show was not delivered in English.

Communication by gobbledegook
Nor, be it said, in standard Italian. Venturino is Sicilian himself and Fo (from Lombardy), like Bertolt Brecht, writes ‘working-class theatre'. So dialect is an integral part of the text. So is what he calls ‘gobbledegook', and illustrates with a parody of George W Bush's incoherence and a bumbling stiff-upper-lip colonial old fart. But Venturino, a master of movement and mime, communicates the details and twists of the narrative in a way that is beyond mere language and, for me, defies classification.

To us reserved Anglo-Saxons, who find cordial kissing repugnant and even handshakes sometimes embarrassing, this is unfamiliar. But body language, facial gesture, diction, posture and movement – in fact total theatre - are invaluable and quintessential techniques for performing musicians, anyone working in the television or theatre or indeed teaching.

[Find the adjectives yourself]
To attempt to describe the performance would be to do the event itself a disservice. Magical, spellbinding, hilariously funny, passionate, certainly. But not in a way I have seen in forty years of theatre-going. I have seen powerful one-person shows (not least from Roy Chubby Brown, whose sheer stamina and energy similarly impressed), ballet, mime and multi-media events.

This one defies classification, definition, logic and, looking back, reason. Maybe it is because Fo's work touches deep political and social emotions, maybe because of the almost operatic nature of the delivery. Maybe it is because we sometimes need the unknown, intangible and unexpected.

Sublime triumph
I do not know. I am certain of one thing, though: this is a performer of rare and unusual qualities, and in a sublime mix, that I had never seen till I came to Lancaster. The Gregson has achieved a triumph in that it is one of Lancaster's ‘hidden gems' that my colleagues on Virtual Lancaster mention from time to time. When he returns, make sure you book.

Copyright © 14 December 2003 Michael Nunn

Mistero Buffo by Dario Fo
Performed by Antonio Venturino
Gregson Centre, Lancaster
One night only - Wednesday 12 November 2003
at 8 pm

Previewed by Michael Nunn

Mystery and Morality Play for our time
Have you seen the series of ‘Canterbury Tales' on BBC recently? Well, the idea of reworking medieval literature and turning it into powerful contemporary drama has all been done before – in Italy, some thirty years ago, by a radical Italian dramatist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997.

Dario Fo's Mistero Buffo (or ‘The Comic Mysteries') is a wickedly funny, biting and contemporary updating of medieval mystery and morality plays. Fo has a strong left-wing political background, and takes the subversive texts of the medieval giullari and zanni (who were a cross between the newscasters and social critics of the middle ages) and reworks them for modern audiences.

Like the BBC series based on the fourteenth-century Chaucer, Fo highlights the fallibilities and foibles of human nature, particularly those of the ruling classes and, highly topically, the Catholic Church. Just as Chaucer did, he exposes some of the least attractive characteristics of our age.

Licensed mayhem
The twelve stories in the published text are narrated by a single actor, the irrepressible Antonio Venturino, who hails from Sicily. He will be familiar to those of us privy to the well-kept secret that The Gregson has hosted one of only the two men licensed by the playwright to perform this piece. Earlier this year he presented an excellent show on the anarchic Commedia dell'Arte, the source of many fairy tales and pantomimes. This was a sheer joy to watch, listen to and, on this occasion, get riotously involved with. Venturino has a delivery, a vocabulary and a style which put most contemporary British stand-up comedians to shame.

Tickets for Lazarus
Master satirist Fo depicts, to take one example, the tale of the Resurrection of Lazarus described by a bystander who is hassled by seating-ticket touts and other money-grabbers. It has often been wondered that if the second coming were to take place today, what Jesus would make of it. Would He still cast out the money-changers and other charlatans and assorted hypocrites who somehow seem to be attracted to religion? The drunken guest's perspective on the Marriage at Cana clearly delivers an answer …

Political and social critique
…Which is an emphatic No. The privileged theatre, and the morality, of the middle classes is not for Dario Fo – he worked in factories and on the streets in downtown Milan and anywhere else he and his company could play. He is merciless in his attacks on contemporary morality and attitudes, but is also wickedly funny at the same time.

His best-known work, Accidental Death of an Anarchist of 1983, satirizes the corruption of the Italian establishment which, with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, is even now still one of the major scandals of the European Union.

Human understanding and sympathy
Just as in Chaucer, there is a more compassionate side to Fo's writing too. The Passion Plays, which are the last four of the twelve pieces, show the more ‘tragic' rather than the ‘comic' side to the coin. Here he shows that he understands completely the appalling suffering humanity as shown in the angst of the Blessed Virgin Mary during Jesus' final hours. I can think of few contemporary dramatists that can handle both the political and the personal agendas so passionately within twenty minutes.

Undeserved neglect
I spoke to a theatre studies student in her final year recently, and she had never heard of Dario Fo. He is one of the most important European playwrights of the last forty or so years, and still writing. I saw his recent Il Diavolo con le Zinne (literally ‘The Devil with Tits On') produced by students in Scarborough a couple of years ago, and in no way has Fo lost his bite or anger.

With the inexplicable faddishness and ‘postmodernism' (what does that mean?) of the more innovative British theatre companies, performances of his work are now alas rare. Nor do the reactionary bean-counting houses include his works either. That makes it all the more a coup that The Gregson (note, not the University or The Dukes!) has managed to book this event.

Go for it. At £5 a ticket (£4 for concessions) this is a real steal. Talk to Venturino in the bar afterwards if you have the chance – it is as if you are meeting the playwright himself. This evening should be a rare treat.

Copyright © 5 October 2003 Michael Nunn