TEHRAN-The play “All Thieves Are Not Thieves” will be performed at Farabi Hall in Sowme'eh Sara City, Gilan Province, from May 20 to 24.

Mahan Naeimi directed the play based on a comedic drama by Italian playwright Dario Fo titled “The Virtuous Burglar” (also known as “Not All Thieves Come to Harm You”). 

Ali Akhavan, Sogand Khan-Zolfi, Bahman Azad, Maryam Dashti, Mahgol Sadat Sahrghi, and Misagh Naeimi are in the cast of the 75-minute play.

The story of the one-act play is about a thief who enters the deputy mayor's house, while the deputy comes home with his secret lover Julia and the thief hides in a pendulum clock.

Dario Fo (1926-2016) was an Italian playwright, actor, comedian, singer, theater director, stage designer, songwriter, painter, political campaigner for the Italian left wing, and the recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature. 

In his time, he was arguably the most widely performed contemporary playwright in world theatre. Much of his dramatic work depends on improvisation and comprises the recovery of illegitimate forms of theater, such as those performed by giullari (medieval strolling players) and, more famously, the ancient Italian style of commedia dell'arte.

His plays have been translated into 30 languages and performed across the world, including in Argentina, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, India, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, the UK, the U.S., and Iran.

His work of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s is peppered with criticisms of assassinations, corruption, organized crime, racism, Roman Catholic theology, and war. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, he took to lampooning Forza Italia and its leader Silvio Berlusconi, while his targets of the 2010s included the banks amid the European sovereign debt crisis. Also in the 2010s, he became the main ideologue of the Five Star Movement, the anti-establishment party led by Beppe Grillo, often referred to by its members as “the Master”.

His receipt of the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature marked the “international acknowledgment of Fo as a major figure in twentieth-century world theatre”. The Swedish Academy praised Fo as a writer “who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden”.

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