SOURCE: An introduction to Dario Fo Plays: Two, Methuen Drama, 1994, pp. xix-xxx.

Rame is Fo's wife and collaborator. In the essay below, which was written in 1975, she recalls their early years working together.

There are many people who seem to think—perhaps because it is easier and more exciting—that our transition (I mean Dario's and mine) from the traditional theatre to that in which we now work, occurred suddenly, almost overnight, as a consequence of a sort of mystical crisis, as though we had been overcome by the 1968 wave of students' protest and workers' struggles. As if one fine morning we woke up saying: 'That's enough, let's wrap ourselves up in the red flag, let's have our own cultural revolution!'

In fact our true turning point, the point that really mattered, we took at the very beginning of our journey, twenty-two years ago, when with Paventi...