THE RECEPTION OF FRANCA RAME’S THEATER IN SPAIN

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to study the reception of the dramatic production of the Italians Dario Fo and Franca Rame in Spain. Due to the great fecundity of these playwrights -more than eighty plays-, as well as their long career -from the fifties to the present day-, the field of analysis has been limited to the period from the seventies to the end of the nineties, a time in which publications and performances of their plays are regular in Spain. It is fundamentally a work of documentation on the translations of their works that have been made in these decades both in Spanish and Catalan, as well as the representations that have taken place throughout the Spanish territory. For this purpose, we have analysed reviews, articles, reports, and interviews published in the daily press and magazines, with special attention to "El País" and "Primer Acto", two samples of national press and theatrical magazines that provide us with a lot of information about the reception of Fo and Rame's work from different aspects: the theatrical, obviously, but, given the interest that these two figures arise, also from other points of view, such as the political, social, or moral. An invaluable source of documentation -even though it is not always systematic and sometimes lacks fundamental data- is the Archivio Franca Rame, a website where the playwrights have been posting year by year everything that has to do with them, in Italy and abroad; both private documents - letters, contracts, congratulations... - and articles and reviews about their activity, but also theatre programs, scripts, drawings, and photographs.
1997 is a key year to understand how these works arrive and how they are received in Spain because it is then when Dario Fo was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, an important international distinction not without controversy, especially in Italy, and for which both Fo and Rame are placed in the spotlight of the Spanish written media and has as an immediate consequence the considerable increase in the number of publications and performances of their plays in Spain.