Campus, Filomena (2026) Liberate Rame! Franca Rame and the politics of theatre-making. Doctoral thesis, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

Abstract

This multimodal research analyses the work and legacy of Italian theatre-maker, political activist, and archivist Franca Rame (1929-2013), foregrounding her significance as a radical and innovative figure within feminist and theatrical histories. The thesis articulates Rame's work as and through feminist practice, by examining the entanglement of social, political, and personal relationships in the creative processes she developed with Dario Fo (1926-2016) and their collaborators. It situates her practice within key debates in feminist theatre and performance studies, enabling critiques that acknowledge both the articulation and disavowal of feminism in er work. The study adopts a mixed ethods approach, encompassing oral history, arcival research, performance analysis, and practice research, to examine Rame's work through a feminist and materialist framework that foregrounds collaboration, contextual dynamics, relationality, and shared authorship. I trace Rame's artistic development from her childhood in the 1930s to her departure from her family's theatre company in the 1950s. I then examine the post-1968 period when Rame and For founded their radical leftist collectives, Nuova Scena and La Comune, and concludes with an analysis of Rame's work within the re-established Compagnia Teatrale Fo Rame from the 1980s to 2013. The research makes three original contributions: it offers the first English-language account of Rame's theatre-making process; it analyses her work in relation to Italian feminisms; and it provides a critical understanding of her development of scenic writing as radical reworkings of traditional Italian theatre techniques. Collectively, theses findings challenge dominant patriarchal narratives that have marginalized Rame's work, by advancing feminist methodologies that highlight the intersection of material, political practices and social reproduction in the process of theatre-making. The thesis offers groundbreaking insights into Rame's significance and legacy and proposes strategies to reactivate her work in current feminist performance contexts.