Canberra REP November 20 – December 6, 2025
Reviewed by Frank McKone
Nov 21
An uproarious new version of Dario Fo's frenetic farce Can't Pay? Won't Pay! which, although set in Italy, has an all too familiar ring to it. Housewives Antonia and Margherita, fed up with high prices in the supermarket, take matters into their own hands and start shoplifting. Keen to keep their light-fingered antics from their husbands, Giovanni and Luigi - not to mention the police - the women are forced to resort to more and more inventive hiding places, and more and more elaborate cover stories, in this legendary comedy. Nobel prize winner Dario Fo [was] Italy's leading contemporary playwright, renowned for his hilarious satires including Accidental Death of an Anarchist. He has re-written his classic farce Can't Pay? Won't Pay! to take into account the global banking crisis and this translation, by world-leading Fo scholar Joseph Farrell, hints at UK current affairs too, including the credit crunch and MPs' expenses scandal. Although first written in 1970, this updated farce is still very relevant to today's state of affairs. (https://www.amazon.sg/Low-Pay-Dont/dp/140813103X)
Directed by Cate Clelland
Written by Dario Fo, translation by Joseph Farrell (Hachette 2010)
CAST
Maddie Lee – Toni Chloe Smith – Maggie
Lachlan Abrahams – Joe Rowan McMurray – Lou
Antonia Kitzel – The Actor
Ensemble
Ben Zolfaghari - Stephanie van Lieshout - Ariana Barzinpour - Georgie Bianchini Rucha Tathavadkar - Sterling Notley - Rosemary Gibbons - Paul Jackson
CREATIVES
Cate Clelland: Set Designer; Stephen Still: Lighting Design
Neville Pye: Sound Design; Darcy Abrahams: Costume Design
Rosemary Gibbons: Properties Coordinator
Russell Brown OAM I Special properties construction
PRODUCTION
David Goodbody: Stage Manager: John Stead: Production Manager
Lachlan Ruffy: Assistant Director; Russell Brown OAM: Set Coordinator Elizabeth Goodbody: FoH Coordinator & Council liaison
TEAMS
Sets: Russell Brown OAM, Andrew Kay, Brian Moir, Wolfgang Hecker,
Eric Turner, John Klingberg
Wardrobe:Darcy Abrahams, Wardrobe Wenches
Lighting: Anne Gallen, Ashley Pope, Lennard Duck, Liz de Totth Sound: Andrea Garcia, Imogen Holland, John Maguire
Properties & Set Dressing: Rosemary Gibbons
Stage Crew: Emily Backhouse, Julie Barnes, Mae Schembri
Front of House: REP members & volunteers
Artwork & Promotons: Tiana Johannis Design, Helen Drum
Marketing: Victoria Dixon, Helen Drum
Program: Helen Drum
Promotional & Foyer Images: Ross Gould, Victoria Dixon
https://socialistworker.co.uk/obituaries/dario-fo-a-committed-revolutionary-who-stood-against-the-state 2016
Italian dramatist Dario Fo, who has died at the age of 90, was one of the great artistic and political revolutionaries of the 20th and 21st centuries.
His death has prompted hollow eulogies from some members of the Italian ruling class. Make no mistake, however, the bourgeoisie despised Fo and the feeling was entirely mutual.
Fo’s great plays, such as Accidental Death of an Anarchist, Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay! and Mistero Buffo (a one-man piece that confirmed Fo’s brilliance as an actor), are both spectacularly funny and savage in their satire of the rich and powerful.
So what on earth are all these people in the Canberra Repertory Theatre, based in the centre of Australian Government, doing?
Do they really support a Socialist Workers’ Revolution?
You could certainly think so when the lead actors, Maddie Lee as Toni, Chloe Smith as Maggie, Lachlan Abrahams as Toni’s husband Joe and Rowan McMurray as Maggie’s husband Lou, actually managed to make us believe in their characters, and even feel sorry for their plight as ordinary workers and wives in our world of continuous inflation, despite the absolutely zany, and therefore very funny, plot.
This is because of the clever way director Cate Clelland has combined an absurdist style of choreographed group work for the workers like police, council workers and so on – led by Antonia Kitzel – with the desperate attempts by the two couples to make sense of it all.
Then the moment finally comes where we understand the point of it all as our set of characters meld back in time with the backdrop picture of the Italian workers Dario Fo originally presented in 1976.
In other words, the message is, nothing has changed. We can’t forget the intensity of people’s struggle to find toilet paper in 2007.
I don’t know how many REP members are public servants. Enough I hope to cause more than a laugh or two in the appropriate policy departments in working out ways not only to better balance economic inequality, but also to manage zero damaging emissions of CO2 in the atmosphere before our world becomes even more impossible to live in than Dario Fo imagined.
Low Pay? Don’t Pay! is the kind of ‘comedy’ which must not be missed.
