'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

'Escaping domestic servitude to enjoy free love; the assault on body and spirit of a gang rape; the joys and vicissitudes of a day and a night on the razzle: in the skillful hands of Gillian Hanna, who also translates Franca Rame and Daria Fo's sparkling plays, this becomes the dramatic stuff of women's lives.'-Ann McFerran, Time Out

Edited by Stuart Hood and translated by: Gillian Hanna, who performed a selection of pieces to great critical acclaim at the Half Moon Theatre, London in 1989; Ed Emery, political activist and translator of Fo's Mistero Buffo; and Christopher Cairns, Italianist and Reader in Italian Drama, at the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth.

'I ought to warn you that the author of this sick little play, Dario Fo, has the traditional, irrational hatred of the police common to all narrowminded left-wingers and so I shall, no doubt, be the unwilling butt of endless anti-authoritarian jibes'—Inspector Bertozzo, Central Italian Police HQ

In its first two years of production, 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. 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.

'A marvelous concept: a zany political farce...'—Michael Billington, Guardian

'Fo's play absorbs social indignation into mainstream Italian comedy'—Irving Wardle, The Times

In the words of his translator, Ron Jenkins: 'The Nobel committee's decision to honor Fo as a master of literature is a historic tribute to the theatre, which is still viewed by many as literature's bastard child; it is also the first time that the Nobel for the literary arts has been awarded to an actor. This courageous and controversial choice indirectly expands the modern definition of literature to include the power of the spoken word.'

Volume One includes:
We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!
Elizabeth
Archangels Don't Play Pinball
About Face

Fo Plays: 1 contains some of the playwright's best work, including: Mistero Buffo, a work based on research into medieval mystery plays; Accidental Death of an Anarchist, which 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; and Trumpets and Raspberries, a play in which the boss of Italy's biggest car manufacturer, FIAT, is mistaken for a left-wing terrorist.

The volume also contains two of Fo's previously unpublished short farces: The Virtuous Burglar and One was Nude and One Wore Tails.

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