Supermarket prices have risen to the point that dual-income Canberra families are turning in desperation to food relief charities for the first time, and local MP and government minister Dr Andrew Leigh last month introduced draft legislation to make price gouging illegal.

Canberra Rep’s latest production, Low Pay? Don’t Pay! — a translation of Nobel Prize-winning Communist playwright Dario Fo’s 1974 farce Non si paga, non si paga! — tackles the issue from a comic perspective.

Fo was the most widely performed contemporary playwright in the world, and Non si paga was his second-most popular play, staged in 35 countries by 1990.

The play revolves around a supermarket revolt where working-class women refuse to pay inflated prices and instead set their own. Toni (Maddie Lee), a public housing resident who has been unable to afford rent or bills for some time, takes advantage of the demonstration to shoplift and fill her own bags. Her friend Maggie (Chloe Smith) helps hide the loot — but can they evade the police?

The play was a critique of greedy shopkeepers and landlords, employers who slash wages and benefits, the political complacency that allowed these conditions to persist, and the Italian Communist Party telling workers to accept lower standards of living for the national good.

“Even though it’s a play out of history, it is a play of our times,” director Cate Clelland says. “When I agreed to direct this, I was really angry because Woolworths was caught saying things were half-price when they weren’t. I thought: This is so contemporary, and yet the things that the people in the play face are the things that unfortunately we’re still facing many years later.”

Clelland normally dislikes updating settings, but Fo encouraged localisation. Rep’s production takes place not in mid-Seventies Milan, but in today’s Canberra.

“Even though the play was written in 1974, things haven’t changed as much as we would like,” Clelland said. “It’s easily localised. Obviously, details are different, but the general feeling of people’s attitudes and their difficulties in living are still there all these years later.”

A fortnight after Non si paga premiered, groups of women protested supermarket price hikes by paying pre-inflation prices at the till. Right-wing newspapers accused Fo of inspiring the protests, but courts found the women had simply paid the fair value of the goods.

Clelland doesn’t advise audiences to start stealing from supermarkets, but she says the play shows that we have responsibility for our lives.

“Things are out of control, but we can take a stand, put our foot down, and speak up.”

For all its political bite, the play is fast-paced and funny, even ridiculous, high in physical energy and unrolling at breakneck speed. Clelland quotes John Cleese’s remark that being serious should never be confused with being solemn.

“We need to look at some things quite seriously — but you wrap up the parcel in something fun and pretty,” she says.

Fo was a satirist who drew on clowning, commedia dell’arte, comic provocation, and absurdist farce to expose injustice. When he received the Nobel Prize in 1997, the Swedish Academy said he “emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden”.

“[Fo’s] way of looking at the world and criticising things that he thought needed criticising was to make fun of them, to belittle them, to ridicule them,” Clelland says. “Farce allows us to ridicule ourselves, to look at ourselves honestly, to admit our faults without despairing.

“Anybody who likes Monty Python should come — it’s that kind of wacky humour. It’s entertaining; it’s fun; it’s unusual; it’s not a run-of-the-mill play — it will touch some people and reverberate with them.”

Low Pay? Don’t Pay!, by Dario Fo, directed by Cate Clelland, showing at Canberra Rep until 6 December. Tickets: $25 to $50, via https://canberrarep.org.au/.