The Pope and the Witch/the First Miracle of the Infant Jesus

by Dario Fo, Ed Emery (Translator)

Two plays by one of Europe's greatest comic writers.

Genres: Plays

145 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1997

About the author

Dario Fo was an Italian satirist, playwright, theatre director, actor, and composer. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997. In 2007 he was ranked Joint Seventh with Stephen Hawking in The Telegraph's list of 100 greatest living geniuses. His dramatic work employed comedic methods of the ancient Italian commedia dell'arte, a theatrical style popular with the proletarian classes. He owned and operated a theatre company with his wife, the leading actress Franca Rame. Dario Fo died in Milan on October 13th 2016, at the age of 90.

Reviews

[Steven Godin]

Two more plays from the Italian maestro of farcical theatre.
The pope and the Witch was bloody hilarious! The First Miracle of the Baby Jesus was quite short but still pretty good.

[Frank]

Italian Woody Allen from Rome with love and burlesque to whom I’m neither friend nor foe.
I read it this May when “habemos papam” was still echoing in St Peter’s Square, when my mind was racing with the Giro d’Italia in the Bel Paese. Why I read it? Because of aforementioned reasons and because I remembered an excerpt which made me smile while reading it in a textbook of Italian.
Of course, common sense witticisms abound and “no time for poetry” in this book of bizarre antics but no romantics.

[whynnot]

Sadly Eurocentric