When Marieke Hardy’s adaptation of Dario Fo and Franca Rame’s anarchic farce Sotto Paga! Non Si Paga! premiered at the Sydney Opera House in March 2020, all the foyer talk was of the recent catastrophic bushfires and the looming Covid-19 pandemic. A couple of weeks later, the latter closed this show halfway through its season.
Four years later – and no doubt hoping to make good on the considerable investment that went into it – Sydney Theatre Company has revived No Pay? No Way! against the background of soaring rents, the cost-of-living crisis and the news that the government is attempting to address supermarket profiteering. In this way No Pay? No Way! feels very 2024, even though it was written in the mid-1970s, when Italy’s economy and government were a bin fire of inflation and corruption.
Fo and Rame’s plot starts in the aftermath of a riot at a local supermarket. Unhappy shoppers, women mostly, faced with prices that have doubled overnight, have taken matters into their own hands (along with as many groceries as they could carry).
Among those in the supermarket that morning were Antonia (Mandy McElhinney) and Margherita (Emma Harvie), neighbours from the same working-class apartment block. The play opens with the elated women returning to Antonia’s flat to share the spoils of their unplanned anti-capitalist action.
Antonia is high on a sense of victory. The goods aren’t stolen, she maintains, they’ve been “liberated”. The younger, mousier Margherita is visibly terrified, however. And why wouldn’t she be? The cops are already conducting house-to-house searches in the neighbourhood. And there’s another problem: Antonia’s husband, Giovanni (Glenn Hazeldine), a staunch by-the-book trade unionist, is just the kind of bloke to report his wife for shoplifting.
Antonia, much given to brainwaves, has an idea: she’ll hide her loot under the bed and Margherita can smuggle hers out in bags slung underneath her coat. At worst, people will think she’s pregnant. What can possibly go wrong?
From here, a convoluted caper unfolds, one involving Antonia and Margherita, some unwanted pet food, a socialist policeman (and his higher-ranking doppelganger), a surprising level of ignorance in matters of reproductive biology, and a festival celebrating a fictional Catholic saint and a coffin.
Directed by Sarah Giles (who also directed STC’s whip-smart production of Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist in 2018), this production deftly foregrounds women’s experiences of economic hardship (and male stupidity) while providing a near constant stream of ticklish laughs.
Stepping into the role that Helen Thomson played in 2020, McElhinney is a bolshie and charismatic Antonia, whose outlandish workarounds fuel the spiralling mania of the play.
Harvie’s comic athleticism comes to the fore (especially after interval) as the mousy Margherita is forced out of her shell and into performing a bizarre religious rite.
Hazeldine, a veteran of the first production, is marvellously funny as Giovanni. A lengthy but brilliant dumbshow in which we observe the hungry worker addressing the possibility of dog food for dinner is almost Chaplinesque (think The Gold Rush) in its detail and comic appeal. You might find yourself gagging a little.
Aaron Tsindos (also from the first iteration) generates ripples of delighted applause for his comically contrasting Carabinieri. His miming of a traffic infringement gone wrong is a hoot, likewise his fourth wall-breaking appeal to the property investors in the audience to consider him as a potential tenant. New hire Roman Delo contributes some good work, too, as Margherita’s newlywed husband comes to terms with his wife’s sudden pregnancy.
As with the first production, there is some bagginess and indulgence in the second half of the play, which Giles explodes with meta-theatrical business involving a mutinous stage crew. Tsindos’ goofy undertaker feels like comic overreach. Elsewhere, there are momentary glimpses of a revival that hasn’t had the rehearsal time it needs to run flat-out. But it’ll get there, for sure.
The story goes that in the wake of the very first production of Sotto Paga! Non Si Paga! in Milan in 1974, there were reports of looting and rioting in local supermarkets. That seems unlikely to catch on here. Perhaps we’ve grown too comfortable with supermarket duopoly, entrenched inequality and insecurity – which might account for the mixed tone of hope and resignation that settles over the final scene in which the cast sings Bella Ciao, a song of resistance that gained currency under Nazi occupation.
No Pay? No Way! plays at the Drama theatre, Sydney Opera House until 11 May
