discover. experience. belong.

Low Pay? Don't Pay! Programme

Canberra REP has transitioned to digital programs, phasing out our colour printed A5 booklets at the end of Season 2024.
Please note that the complimentary flyer is designed as a Play Bill - more information is available below.

LOW PAY? DON'T PAY!

by Dario Fo, translation by Joseph Farrell
director Cate Clelland

An Amateur production By Arrangement with ORiGiN (TM) Theatrical on behalf of Samuel french Inc. A Concord Theatricals Company

CAST • CREATIVES • PRODUCTION • TEAMS • DONORS | SUPPORTERS

SYNOPSIS

Desperate times call for desperate measures…and with problems so desperately familiar, join with Toni and Maggie as they navigate their own cost of living crisis!
Incensed by ever-increasing high prices at the supermarket, the locals take matters into their own hands. Outrage turns into demonstrations and riots at supermarkets, which ends in a shoplifting spree.
On her way home Toni bumps into her friend Maggie, who promises to help find creative ways to hide the loot. From then on it’s one crazy disaster after another. Especially when the police arrive!
‘Farce at its finest…simply glorious’ The Stage

ACT I

Scene l | Street in Canberra
Scene 2 | Joe & Toni's flat

ACT II

RUN TIME

120 minutes - plus one 20 minute interval

Bar service available up to 5 minutes before start of ACT I, at interval & after the performance

PRODUCTION WARNING

There is a strong language warning for this production, appearing as text on set and within the play. There is also use of flashing spotlight effects which are at times directed over the audience.

Thanks to Aldi Jamieson and Coles Supermarkets for thei kind permission to use their trolleys for this production.

DIRECTOR'S NOTES • Cate Clelland

Dario Fo has been an important literary and theatrical figure in Italy, and then Internationally, since the 1960s and 70s, and especially in the 1990s when he was the recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Literature. He was a playwright, actor, director, clown, all things theatrical, political activist and defender of the defenceless. He was bold and brave and ready to stand up to anyone or anything, ready to target ideas, policies, individual people, political leaders and governments he thought should be made accountable. He was prosecuted and even imprisoned on occasions for his outspoken-ness.
Fo’s manifesto was “the first rule of theatre is that there are no rules.” This isn’t true for most of us. We like plays to be consistent in style and characters to be psychologically consistent, and we mostly like the ‘fourth wall’ to remain intact. But Dario Fo wasn’t concerned about such things. Any one of his plays uses a whole raft of styles: anything to get the message across.
To present his serious political and social message, Fo developed a raw, energetic style of comedy as a weapon against those who exploited others. His boisterous, non-realistic style was influenced by farce, medieval travelling theatre, Shakespeare, commedia dell’arte and comedy in general. He created plays that criticised the establishment and focused on things that concerned society and especially the working class.
In Low Pay? Don’t Pay!, Fo takes us to the grass roots of society - working class people struggling to balance low wages and scarcity of work with the ever-increasing cost of living – or just surviving. Serious issues are explored – poverty, exploitation, injustice, inequality and corruption are given the Dario Fo treatment: a style of farce that is exaggerated, heightened, over-the-top, ridiculous!
So, is it wise to trust the most serious issues of life to the hands of clowns? Well, Dario Fo would say ‘yes’. Ridiculing one’s enemy is a time-honoured strategy, and Fo uses ridicule like a scalpel to slash at his opponent - the exploiters, the oppressors of the downtrodden.
Fo encouraged directors and producers of his plays to localise them to suit the particular circumstances of the performances. So, although the play was originally set in Milan, ours is set here and now in Canberra. The original Italian central characters become Australian and New Zealanders, Toni, Maggie, Joe and Louis, the children of migrants whose Italian heritage is not far in the past.
The play is totally ridiculous, illogical and crazy, but at its core it is deadly serious. To Dario Fo, nothing is sacred, and he is willing to call out anything and anyone he believes is doing the wrong thing. Many of the issues that faced people in 1974 are still facing us today – poverty, exploitation, injustice, inequality, unfairness and a whole lot of ‘new’ issues!
This makes this play as current as today! So yes, accept that it’s very silly, but put aside what you know to be logical and have some fun. And in the process, the message is inescapable.

PLAYWRIGHT • Dario Fo

Dario Luigi Angelo Fo was the oldest child of a station master for the Italian State railway. His father was a socialist and an actor, and Fo learned storytelling from his maternal grandfather and Lombardy fishers and glassblowers. In 1942 he was one of the last generations conscripted into the fascist army of Mussolini’s Republica Sociale Italiana. He deserted with the aid of false documents and looked for the resistance movement, sleeping rough in the countryside.
After the war he took up architectural studies before becoming disillusioned by the type of work expected of post-war architects and had a nervous breakdown. A doctor told him to do-that-which-brought-him-joy, so he joined the piccolo theatre (small theatre) movement and began to present improvised monologues. In the early 50s he began performing on radio in variety shows, telling stories of his upbringing. He moved onto a solo show telling adult fairy tale monologues adapted from biblical and historical tales, although the radio show was cancelled and he moved on to start performing similar material onstage at the Theatro Odeon in Milan.
He met Franca Rame, the daughter of a theatrical family, while they were both working on a revue. They would marry in 1954. After a brief attempt to work in cinema in Rome, including some work for Dino De Laurentis, they formed the Compagnia Fo-Rame in Milan, with Fo writing, acting, directing, and designing sets and costumes, and Rame as lead actress and administrator. Fo’s first international hit, Gli arcangeli non gioano al flipper (Archangels Don’t Play Pinball) (1959) would go on to performances in Yugoslavia, Poland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Spain.
During 1962 he attempted a TV series for the RAI network, but it was frequently censored. Finally a dispute over a sketch in the 8^th episode about building site conditions saw national uproar and questions asked in Italian parliament, and Fo and Rame banned from Italian TV for 14 years. As the decade went on they withdrew from the Italian state theatres and set up their own Collectives in working class neighbourhoods of Milan, touring community Centres and workers clubs.
In December 1970 he premiered his most internationally recognised play, Morte Accidentale di un anarchico (Accidental Death of an Anarchist). In 1974 he would premiere Non Si Paga! Non Si Paga! (aka Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!, Low Pay? Don’t Pay or No Pay No Way). He would return to TV with a filming of a cycle of some of his plays in 1977 although both Anarchist and Can’t Pay were filmed for a permanent record but not aired. His monologue Misterio Buffo, originally written in 1969 and toured until 1999 was part of this cycle, and was condemned by the Vatican as “the most blasphemous show in the history of television”.
In 1980 he and Rame were blocked from performing at an American Festival of Italian Theatre, leading to a performance in New York of “An Evening without Dario Fo and Franca Rame”, including the reading of the first act of Non Si Paga! and a letter from Fo and Rame. In 1983 they would be again refused entry to the US, and were accused of “belonging to organisations supporting terrorist groups”.
In 1997 he would receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, the citation stating he “emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden”. He died in October 2016 of a serious respiratory disease.

Joseph Farrell

Joseph Farrell is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Strathclyde, serving as professor of Italian and head of the Department of Modern Languages there until retiring in 2010. Since then he has served as visiting professor at Flinders University and University of Melbourne, University of Warsaw in Poland, University of Edge Hill in Liverpool and the University of Venice in Italy. He has written a cultural history of Sicily, a book on Robert Louis Stephenson in Samoa, and biographies of Dario Fo and Leonardo Sciascia, as well as doing translations of Fo, Sciascia, Venconzo Consolo and Valerio Varesi. In 2005 he received the honour of Cavaliere of the Republic of Italy for his services in assisting the promotion of Italian culture abroad. He also served as theatre critic for the Scotsman newspaper and has provided a regular review article in the Scottish Review of Books on theatre productions in Scotland. He lives in Glasgow.

compiled by Simon Tolhurst