Mon, 05 May, 2025 — Sat, 10 May, 2025
Directed by Ben Standish
A pulsating and anarchic storytelling rollercoaster that questions history, mocks the elite and speaks truth to power.
A penniless travelling performer bursts into the theatre, pursued by the authorities. Whilst the threat of arrest remains close, he can’t help but hijack the stage and tell folk tales lampooning the elite…and maybe earn a quid or two doing it.
Subversive and satirical, Mistero Buffo is an infamous play by Nobel Prize-winning writer Dario Fo, and his actress-wife Franca Rame, that the Vatican described as “blasphemous”.
This new Scots version, translated by Joseph Farrell, is the play’s first Scottish production since being performed by Robbie Coltrane over 30 years ago.
Co-presented with Ayr Gaiety, in association with the Italian Cultural Institute of Edinburgh. Supported by the Andrew Tannahill Fund.
Dario Fo, an Italian actor-author, can claim to be one of the most frequently performed living playwright in the world. Born on Lake Maggiore in northern Italy in 1926, he made his debut in theatre in 1952 and has been writing, performing and painting until 15 days before his passing, on October 16th, 2016. His work has gone through various phases, always in company with his actress wife Franca Rame. His stage career began with political cabaret, moved on to one-act farces, and then to satirical comedies in his so-called ‘bourgeois phase’ in the early 1960s when he became a celebrated figure on TV and in Italy’s major theatres. In 1968, he broke with conventional theatre to set up a co operative dedicated to producing politically committed work in what were then known as ‘alternative venues’. His best known work, including Accidental Death of an Anarchist, Mistero Buffo and Trumpets and Raspberries, date from this period. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997, and the official citation the Swedish Royal Academy stated that he had ‘emulated the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden.’
Ben Standish is a director and actor based in Glasgow. Originally studying French and Chinese, he then worked as an arts journalist before training at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Credits as a director include Beyond Krapp (Pleasance), 27 (C Venues), A Thousand Sons (Camden People’s Theatre), A Christmas Carol (Shenzhen Poly), Class Act (Traverse), Lost Property (Glastonbury Festival), Timon/Titus (Nottingham New Theatre). Credits as associate/assistant director include Love Beyond (Vanishing Point/Raw Material), Jack & The Beanstalk (Beacon Arts Centre), A Very Expensive Poison (RCS), Jinnistan, Inheritance (A Play, A Pie and A Pint), In The Weeds (An Tobar & Mull Theatre), La Performance (Tron Theatre), Hope River Girls (Groupwork). Ben is a facilitator for the Traverse’s Class Act programme, an associate artist of the National Youth Theatre, and is currently leading a verbatim theatre project called Empty Chair. He is also a member of Compass Collective, running creative projects with refugees and people seeking asylum across the UK.
Joseph Farrell was Professor of Italian in the University of Strathclyde. He has also been theatre reviewer, translator of film scripts, novels and plays, including several by Dario Fo, most recently Low Pay? Don’t Pay which did a tour of venues around Glasgow in an adaptation by Johnny McKnight. He is author of several books including a biography of Dario Fo and Franca Rame as well as the biographical study, Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa.