As TV gets political, Italians turn it off

"There is great confusion in Italy between satire and politics," said Paolo Romani, spokesman on communication for Berlusconi's Forza Italia party.

"These left-wing comedians don't make me laugh. They dress up in funny clothes and say they are artists. But they are making extremely serious personal accusations that have nothing to do with satire."

In the show, which has been a sell-out in Rome, Verona, and Milan so far, the septuagenarian playwright plays Silvio Berlusconi and Ms. Rame plays his long-suffering wife, Veronica Lario.

The play depicts Berlusconi visiting Vladimir Putin in a luxury villa in Sicily, where the Russian leader is gunned down by Chechen assassins. He is killed instantly and Berlusconi is injured trying to help him. Part of Putin's brain is transplanted into the Italian prime minister's head, transforming his personality. Eventually, after being accused of every crime in the book, from changing laws to favor his private business interests and having connections with the Mafia, Italy's prime minister is given hair-raising electric-chair treatment for his damaged brain.

Mr. Fo says that artists who criticize the prime minister are being "defenestrated" metaphorically from the state broadcaster RAI for the same reasons left-wing dissidents were literally thrown out of police station windows in the 1970s, when Fo wrote his Nobel Prize- winning "Accidental Death of an Anarchist."

Late last year, Sabina Guzzanti, a vitriolic critic of the whole Italian political class, was barred from the state television network, RAI. Her show, "RAIot (pronounced "Riot"): Weapons of Mass Distraction," was suspended after Mediaset, the prime minister's TV network, sued for defamation. She took her act onto the stage in protest, performing on simultaneous screens for packed theaters around the country. RAI managers said they could not afford the legal fees more Guzzanti shows could notch up.

Italy was ranked lowest for freedom of expression in Europe in a 2002 Reporters Without Borders ranking. The press freedom representative for the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, Freimut Duve, has called on Italy's prime minister to dissociate himself from his media empire, saying it has created a "quasi monopoly."

But Berlusconi argues that "Italy is among the first for absolute freedom of the press" and his lawyers say that he is victim of a constant stream of unfounded personal attacks from left-wing critics.

"Berlusconi is very tolerant," said Nicolo Ghedini, one of the prime minister's lawyers. "But Italy is a strange country. If you want to defend yourself from defamatory accusations here you are accused of censoring artists."

Page: 1 | 2