This collection includes nine monologues concerned with sexual and domestic issues and female oppression: A WOMAN ALONE, MAMMA FRICCHETONA (THE FREAK MOMMY), WAKING UP, WE ALL HAVE THE SAME STORY, DIALOGUE FOR A SINGLE VOICE, MEDEA PROLOGUE, MEDEA, MONOLOGUE OF A WHORE IN A LUNATIC ASYLUM, and IT HAPPENS TOMORROW. Dario Fo and Franca Rame are Italy's best-known performers, playwrights, and political activists. Award-winning actress and director Estelle Parsons toured this version of ORGAMSO ADULTO ESCAPES FROM THE ZOO, concluding with a triumphant run at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in New...

Mistero Buffo, or The Comic Mysteries, is based on research into mediaeval mystery plays; The Accidental Death of an Anarchist concerns the "accidental" (or not) death of an anarchist railwork who "fell" (or was pushed) to his death from a police headquarters window in 1969; Trumpets and Raspberries is "A deeply subversive farce" (The Guardian) in which the boss of Italy's biggest car manufacturer FIAT, is mistaken for a left wing terrorist.

In its first two years of production in Italy, Dario Fo's notorious Accidental Death of an Anarchist was seen by over half a million people. It has since been performed all over the world, and become a classic of twentieth-century drama. A sharp and hilarious satire on police corruption, it concerns the case of an anarchist railway worker who, in 1969, 'fell' to his death from a police headquarters window.
This edition has been adapted by Gavin Richards from Gillian Hanna's translation and features an introduction by Stuart Hood and a preface by Dario Fo.

Twenty monologues for women

Twenty monologues in this volume which range from the deeply serious to the extravagantly comic and accessible to a wide range of audiences
"The pieces are comic, grotesque, on purpose. First of all because we women have been crying for two thousand years. So let's laugh now, even at ourselves" - Franca Rame

"Set at the point where reality and ideology rub up against each other, these] monologues are vivid, concise and entertaining comments on the female condition...comic-but-angry, raw-but-precise" - Independent

Dario Fo is Italy's leading contemporary playwright and performer, renowned throughout the world for his dazzling radical satires

Can't Pay Won't Pay is set in Milan, but "the problems are desperately familiar...Fo-faced farce wears a broad smile and proceeds at breathtaking speed" (Michael Coveney, Financial Times); Elizabeth "It portrays our last Tudor monarch in Fo's characteristically rollicking vein...A triumph for Gillian Hanna as translator" (Marin Hoyle, Financial Times); The Open Couple and An Ordinary Day, written with Franca Rame, deal wittily with the fate of women in a...

In its first two years of production, Dario Fo's controversial farce, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, was seen by over half a million people. It has since been performed all over the world and is widely recognised as a classic of modern drama. A sharp and hilarious satire on political corruption, it concerns the case of an anarchist railway worker who, in 1969, 'fell' to his death from a police headquarters window.

This version of the play was premiered in London in 2003.

Commentary and notes by Joseph Farrell.