The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature delivers two sparkling, imaginative works never before published
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Dario Fo is one of the world’s most important contemporary playwrights, forging subversive wit and unusual linguistic experimentation into a comedy of complete originality.
The Peasants’ Bible is a collection of five monologues drawn from Italian folklore but filtered through Fo’s delightfully singular lens–for example, an Adam and Eve who are passionately entwined like peas in a pod; a race between two classes of men struggling for power that resembles the legend of the Hare and the Tortoise–to form a Bible of the common man.
In The Story of the Tiger, we find a Fourth Army soldier injured fighting Chiang Kai-shek’s army, saved from starvation by being suckled by an enormous tiger, who then comes back to defeat Kai-shek by using model tigers in combat. Together the pieces are an extraordinary addition to the body of work that caused The Times of London to praise Fo as “a people’s artist from an ancient and vital tradition.”
“The provocative Italian winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize is both playwright and actor, as well as an all-round iconoclast.” –The Washington Post
“Fo-faced farce wears a broad smile and proceeds at breathtaking speed.” –The Financial Times
“Besides his seemingly limitless skills, Fo comes across as a people’s artist from an ancient and vital tradition.” –The Times (London)
“We have political theatre and we have comic theatre. But the astonishing thing about Dario Fo is that he manages to combine the two . . . deeply subversive.” –The Guardian (London)
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