With Baroness Louise Casey’s damming report into the Metropolitan Police Force now published in all its shocking detail, it’s an opportune moment to revive Dario Fo’s famous Italian satire on police corruption and set it in modern times.
In 1969 Guisepe Pinelli, an anarchist railway worker, was arrested in connection with the bombing of a bank in Milan, which killed 16 people. He fell from the fourth-floor window of the Police Headquarters where he was being interrogated. Was it really an accident? Did he commit suicide? Or was he murdered?
Fo wrote his subversive and bitterly ironic farce in 1970 at the height of the scandal during the trial. His script, which attacks the hypocrisies, lies and corruption of government, judiciary and police, was based on authentic court documents.
In the 1970s, Fo became the theatre’s most popular political activist. He was popular because he made audiences laugh. Accidental Death of an Anarchist has continued to be staged all over the world by professionals and student bodies alike.
Fo won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997. The citation said he “opened our eyes to the abuses and injustices of society” and “emulated the jesters of the Middle Ages, scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden.”
Newly adapted by Tom Basden and directed by Daniel Raggett, the production does what the old style Italian theatre, the commedia dell’arte, always did and that is to allow for instant improvisation and continual updating. There are lots of references to contemporary events.
The production goes wholeheartedly for manic farce and relies enormously for its laughs on Daniel Rigby, who is cast as a perennial imposter, called Maniac, who is disguised as an investigative magistrate. It is he who interrogates the police and fabricates absurd alibis. Rigby sustains this long and exhausting role with unflagging personality and energy.
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