This collection of plays brings together a political farce, "Can't Pay? Won't Pay!", and "Elizabeth", a radical reinterpretation of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, along with "The Open Couple" and "An Ordinary Day", intimate one-act dramas written in collaboration with Fo's wife Franca Rame.

Dario Fo is Italy's leading contemporary playwright and performer, renowned throughout the world for his dazzling radical satires

Can't Pay Won't Pay is set in Milan, but "the problems are desperately familiar...Fo-faced farce wears a broad smile and proceeds at breathtaking speed" (Michael Coveney, Financial Times); Elizabeth "It portrays our last Tudor monarch in Fo's characteristically rollicking vein...A triumph for Gillian Hanna as translator" (Marin Hoyle, Financial Times); The Open Couple and An Ordinary Day, written with Franca Rame, deal wittily with the fate of women in a society in which both the social system in which they live and its dominant ideology are shaped by men.