Play: Trumpets and Raspberries

Overview
Dario Fo's 1981 farce "Trumpets and Raspberries" thrusts the audience into a whirling satire of power, identity, and social injustice. The play hinges on a comic but cutting case of mistaken identity between a wealthy industrialist and a simple factory worker, turning a violent public incident into an occasion for lampooning elites and exposing systemic corruption. Fo blends slapstick, grotesque comedy, and pointed political commentary to create a work that is both uproarious and unsettling.

Plot and structure
The action begins with an event that leaves the industrialist publicly unrecognizable and a working-class man entangled in the aftermath. A cascade of errors, misreadings and deliberate manipulations transforms the two figures into interchangeable symbols of class and role. Rather than relying on realistic cause-and-effect, Fo arranges episodic scenes in which bureaucrats, doctors, journalists and company men hurry to lock in a convenient narrative, each adding layers of absurdity that complicate the central confusion.
Rather than building to a single dramatic revelation, the play unfolds as a series of escalating set pieces in which identities are claimed, denied and commodified. Fo orchestrates quick reversals and reprises, allowing comic chance and institutional self-interest to expose the moral bankruptcy at the heart of power. The farce's momentum comes from the collision of individual wit with institutional complacency, and from the audience's recognition of the social logic behind the absurdities on stage.

Themes and politics
At its core, the play is a satire of class privilege and the way public narrative is manufactured to protect the powerful. The mistaken identity functions as a device to interrogate who gets to be seen and who is rendered invisible; the wealthy man's social standing shelters him even when his physical appearance is obliterated, while the worker's proximity to truth makes him vulnerable to scapegoating. Fo uses comedy to lay bare how institutions, industrial, legal, and media, conspire to maintain hierarchies and to sanitize scandal.
The play also skewers the complicity of technocrats and professionals who partake in preserving image over justice. Fo's outrage is directed less at individuals than at systems that turn human beings into symbols or commodities. Through irony and exaggeration, he invites the audience to laugh while simultaneously recognizing the cruelty beneath the joke, making the farce a vehicle for political indignation as much as entertainment.

Style and staging
Fo's theatrical DNA, rooted in commedia dell'arte, improvisation and a vaudevillian sense of timing, shines through. Physical comedy, rapid-fire dialogue and grotesque imagery keep the pace lively, while moments of dark humor puncture any complacent amusement. The staging often emphasizes doorways, mistaken entrances and mobility between social spaces to make literal the fluidity and fragility of identity in a stratified society.
Music, mime and exaggerated characterization are used not as mere ornament but as instruments of critique: they amplify the disconnect between surface and substance and invite the audience to adopt a conspiratorial gaze toward the institutions being mocked. Props and costume changes become shorthand for shifting social masks, and the theatre itself becomes a courtroom where public truth is tried and found wanting.

Legacy and impact
"Trumpets and Raspberries" stands as a quintessential example of Fo's ability to fuse ribald comedy with furious social commentary. It remained timely beyond its moment, its satire of manufactured narratives and class hypocrisy resonating whenever power seeks to rewrite inconvenient events. The play's blend of laughter and moral provocation helped sustain Fo's reputation as a playwright who could entertain while unsettling audiences about the structures that govern public life.