NTQ Checklist No. 5: Pier Paolo Pasolini
Pasolini was an extremely unorthodox dramatist. A cult figure in the ‘sixties for his controversial art films, he cultivated notoriety as a rebel who challenged (and was persistently persecuted by) Italy's cultural and political establishment. ‘This hid the fact that, as well as being a successful film-maker, he was an innovative novelist and consummate poet, a tireless essayist, and a provocateur in cultural and social matters, as well as an expert critic and compiler of dialect poetry – a cultural entrepreneur in the fullest sense. The year he wrote the bulk of his theatre, 1966, marked the beginning of his last phase: self-consciously, he assumed both cultural and sexual heterodoxy as an act of defiance against the ‘horrendous universe’ of neo-capitalist Italy and the intolerance of its consumerist values. In Britain, he has been almost entirely neglected except as a film-maker, and much of his work – the entire corpus of theatre and most of his essays – has still to be translated into English. This checklist by Russell Williams will thus hopefully serve as an introduction to the work of an entirely original and provocative playwright. It is followed by a more extended study by Paolo Puppa of perhaps Pasolini's best-known piece for the theatre, Affabulazione .