The cast of Low Pay? Don’t Pay!… “Fo always localised his plays. We’re setting ours in Canberra, which I don’t usually like to do, but it works,” says director Cate Clelland. Photo: Victoria Tyrrell-DixonThe original English translation of 1997 Nobel Laureate Dario Fo’s most famous play Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! became so well known that its title entered the English language. 

But the upcoming Canberra Rep production is using a newer translation by Joseph Farrell, titled Low Pay? Don’t Pay!

It’s a wild farce about two working-class women – out-of-work Toni and her best friend Maggie – who rebel against the soaring cost of living by nicking groceries, then desperately trying to hide their loot from their self-righteous husbands and the cops.

Farrell’s version draws on more contemporary woes: the Global Financial Crisis, greedy banks, skyrocketing power bills, mass redundancies and bumbling political leaders. Still, director Cate Clelland assures me, there’s not a single reference to an overbearing populist leader.

I, for one, have never forgotten the late Domenic Mico’s hilarious TAU Theatre production, where one of the hapless husbands was forced to eat from a freshly opened can of Pal stolen by his wife.

Clelland remembers it, too. “It wasn’t fake,” she says. “The smell was real!”

Like much of Fo, this play is side-splittingly hilarious, but Fo used it to attack Italy’s Communist Party head-on – there’s less of that in Farrell’s much-criticised translation.
“The problem for us was that it was too British,” she says.

“So, we’ve made it Australian – that’s what Fo wanted. He always localised his plays. We’re setting ours in Canberra, which I don’t usually like to do, but it works.”

Fo, she reminds me, was a clown himself.

“We don’t have a physical theatre specialist and there’s not a lot of clowning, but there’s enough,” she says. 

“We draw on just about every kind of comic acting you can imagine.”

To add even more fun, Clelland has introduced an ensemble of eight actors to give the comedy extra energy.

And as the ubiquitous “Actor” character, Rep president Antonia Kitzel gets to play a wild range of roles.

The play ridicules merchants, landlords and bosses, but its original political target was the so-called “moderatism” of the Communist Party, of which Antonia’s husband Joe is a member. In this version, Joe has been rewritten as a member of “New Labour”.

In real life, two weeks after the play’s 1974 premiere, women in Milan began paying what they considered “fair prices” in supermarkets – and when they were charged by police, the courts threw the cases out.

Clelland and I both wonder aloud why Fo, once rated the world’s most performed contemporary playwright, is so rarely seen these days.

She thinks humour may have changed. “And actors like John Cleese, who can be deeply funny and serious at the same time, are few and far between,” she says.

She also finds a darker edge in Fo’s other famous work, Accidental Death of an Anarchist. 

“To Dario Fo, nothing is sacred – he’ll call out anything and anyone doing the wrong thing.” 

Underneath the laughter, his plays are deadly serious and staging Low Pay? Don’t Pay! hasn’t been easy.

“But I’m prepared to give it a go.”

Low Pay? Don’t Pay! Canberra REP, Acton, until December 6.