CUB PLAYS IN AUSTRALIA WHILE TIGER PROWLS AT HOME
Author: By TONY MITCHELL
Date: 11/02/1992
Publication: Sydney Morning Herald

NEXT MONTH, Dario Fo, Italy's foremost actor-playwright, will be 66.
Together with his wife, Franca Rame, he has written, directed and
performed in nearly 60 plays, and he and Rame are still as hyperactive as
ever.

I caught Fo resting in his Milan flat after his new two-and-a-half-hour
solo show, Joha' Padan'. "It's a true story, based on accounts by
16th-century German and Spanish sailors," he said. "Joha' Padan' is a king
of Zanni - a prototype of Harlequin - who ends up by accident on an
expedition to South America.

"When they get there, he becomes a kind of shaman or spiritual leader
among the Indians, and takes part in their resistance."

Joha' Padan' is playing to full houses in the prestigious Teatro Nuovo - a
far cry from the converted suburban cinemas, occupied factories and
occasional sports stadiums where the couple used to perform their
abrasively satirical left-wing political plays in the '70s and '80s.

Fo's age, dislike of long plane journeys and lack of English have meant
that attempts to get him to perform in Australia have always foundered on
the rocks.

Fo's and Rame's most famous plays - Accidental Death of an Anarchist,
Can't pay? Won't pay |, Female Parts, and the semiautobiographical Open
Couple -have been seen here in local productions, but it's their solo
performances, like Fo's Chinese-inspired fable The Tale of a Tiger, that
hit home harder with audiences in Italy.

Fo has been playing Tiger on and off since he first sprung it on an
unsuspecting Milan audience in 1978, and now David Wenham, an actor 40
years Fo's junior, is presenting it at the Seymour Centre.

It's based on a story performed on a street corner in Shanghai by a
Chinese peasant, who immediately attracted Fo's attention by his profuse
roaring, cat-walking, and narration in a minority dialect - spoken by only
60 million people | Fo decided to do his own version in Padano, the
16th-century peasant dialect of the Po valley near Milan.

His most famous solo show in Padano is Mistero Buffo ("Comic Mystery").

After Tiananmen Square, Fo revived Tale of a Tiger with a new, topical
preamble, relating the story to the Chinese students' demonstrations for
democracy.

"In China, the tigress has a very specific allegorical reference. You say
that a woman, or a man, or a nation 'has the tigress' when they make a
stand, and resist, at a time when most people are running away, copping
out and ditching the struggle. A person also 'has the tiger' when they
never expect other people to solve their problems for them."

Surely recent events in China, the USSR and Eastern Europe have shaken
Fo's Maoist beliefs in revolution and working-class struggle?

"I always maintained a highly critical attitude towards the Italian
Communist Party, because I saw its policies as a betrayal of real Marxist
principles of class struggle. I still believe in those principles, because
they involve the struggle to eliminate official doctrines."

For David Wenham, who played the brutal Brett Sprague in The Boys, Gordon
Graham's grim and gritty play, based on the Anita Cobby murder, at the
Stables Theatre last year, and who was also in the Belvoir St football
musical The Headbutt, the style of Tale of a Tiger rather than its
politics had an instant appeal.

"It's so simple and it has enormous comic possibilities for an actor. It's
all about relaying a story to an audience with nothing but your voice and
your body. I did some background research on Chinese history, but I can't
be Dario Fo and I can't be a Chinese peasant, so I think it's a matter of
letting the story tell itself - it's a universal story."