The Italian playwright Dario Fo (71) has won the 1997 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy announced yesterday in Stockholm. The left-wing activist is very much a surprise winner, but he is also a popular one, because he is better known internationally than many recent winners.
The English-speaking world knows him best for his plays Accidental Death Of An Anarchist, Mistero Buffo (The Comic Mysteries), and Can't Pay, Won't Pay!
Fo himself, however, sets little store by the 70 or more literary texts of his work, seeing himself in the tradition of the Italian stroller-player, whose words lie in their relevance to the moment.
"The theatre that we do is throwaway theatre, which doesn't pass into the history of the bourgeoisie, but which is to be used instead like a newspaper, a political meeting, a political action, and thus the problem of perfection no longer exists," he wrote at the height of his political activism in the 1970s.
It is debatable, too, whether his work is worth translating at all. Most of his published work is littered with specifically Italian references, and in performance, he and his wife, the actress Franca Rame, change the text every day.
His Nobel Prize win not only challenges conservative ideas as to what literature is, it also challenges political conservatism. His work has always offered a direct challenge to Italy's repressive right-wing establishment. During the early 1970s, he staged The People's War In Chile when there was a real fear of a right-wing coup in Italy.
During the performance, he set the audience up to believe the coup was in progress, and when an actor-policeman entered and announced that anyone with a party card of any of the ruling parties was free to leave, those who got up with their "meal tickets" were ridiculed.
These were Fo's glory days, when he broke away from traditional theatre and formed a radical political and cultural group, La Comune, which had 30,000 members and played political theatre to audiences of 200,000.
However, he experienced very real political repression. After The People's War In Chile he was arrested. Franca Rame was kidnapped and abandoned, bleeding in a park, by a fascist gang.
In 1980 Fo was barred from entering the US because of his involvement in far left-wing politics.
His peerless knowledge of the improvised, oral tradition of Italian theatre, however, made it difficult for the cultured bourgeoisie to ignore him. From earliest childhood in a small Lombard town, he had learned old stories, and his marriage to Rame, a beautiful actress from an ancient theatrical family, brought him still more theatrical resources. His work is consistent with medieval and Italian Renaissance street theatre - particularly the commedia dell'arte tradition.
His win will come as a shock to the Italian right wing, and even more to Fo himself, who heard the news from the driver of another car as he sped along the motorway between Rome and Milan.