The Peasants’ Bible and the Story of the Tiger

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Dario Fo is one of the world’s most important contemporary playwrights, forging subversive wit and unusual linguistic experimentation into a comedy of complete originality. The Peasants’ Bible is a collection of five monologues drawn from Italian folklore but filtered through Fo’s delightfully singular lens-for example, an Adam and Eve who are passionately entwined like peas in a pod; a race between two classes of men struggling for power that resembles the legend of the Hare and the Tortoise-to form a Bible of the common man. In The Story of the Tiger, we find a Fourth Army soldier injured fighting Chiang Kai-shek’s army, saved from starvation by being suckled by an enormous tiger, who then comes back to defeat Kai-shek by using model tigers in combat. Together the pieces are an extraordinary addition to Fo’s body of work.