On the 12th December 1969 a bomb went off in a bank in Milan killing 17 people. It was followed by more bombs across the city. The Ordine Nuovo were the culprits – a paramilitary organisation looking back to Mussolini and the fascists of days gone by. Make Italy Great Again. With bombs.
The Italian police were like headless chickens and followed their natural propensities. “It must have been anarchists,” they decided, and rounded up the perfectly innocent members of The Anarchist Black Cross. They didn’t fit in. And they had signed up to an anarchist society. Must be wronguns.
On the 15th December, close to midnight, Guiseppe Pinelli, who worked on the railroad, was being interrogated by the Polizia del Stato in Milan. He was wholly innocent but they were convinced of his guilt. Shortly before midnight he was defenestrated. He went through a fourth floor window. He fell to his death. Despite very fishy circumstances, his death was ruled “accidental”. Not murder. Not suicide. He “accidentally” fell out of a raised fourth floor window that was wide open at midnight on a night where it was -3° outside.
The great post war Italian playwright Dario Fo chose this as the catalyst for his famous work “Accidental Death of an Anarchist”. Since then it has been performed widely and frequently. It is on many syllabuses. Usually when it is performed the dead anarchist is Pinelli and his photo is used. The poor man has been mischievously immortalised. It is set in a police station where they are expecting an inquest into this death and they are visited by a maniac insisting he is a master of disguise and is on their side and is trying to help them get their story straight. Things gradually descend into unbridled chaos. The maniac is in dialogue with the audience, while all other characters are behind the fourth wall. Things get very weird very quickly but it all follows a strange logic. The police are lampooned, the audience is hauled out for complacency, everything is under fire. Anarchy is used to point out the flaws in our assumptions about how everything should work.
I first read it at university. Don’t read plays like books. You have to do it out loud and ideally with others. It is so tedious reading the things cold. I was deluged with references to things I didn’t understand at the time. Took me a few sittings.
It is remarkable though, seen live. It’s a brilliant clown show. One clown and the rest are all stooges. The Maniac, as he is called, does most of the talking. It’s a really high octane, full on, constant role. I saw Danny Rigby in a matinee a long way into the run and he is still firing on all cylinders, listening, playing, sweating, working. I first saw Danny at Edinburgh in “Moth Wok Fantastic” which he just booked with an anything name as he didn’t know what he was gonna make. I remember him just flowing with energy in a tiny hot room. He’s great for the maniac. Last time I saw it was at The Donmar with Rhys Ifans. Totally different productions, but both of them absolutely hilarious and completely different, carried by the undeniable charisma of their central performer. Fo is angry. The play is angry. This modern reworking, so well received that it transferred from The Lyric Hammersmith to The West End – it is angry. But the treatment of the anger is bright. By the name and the subject matter you would expect a difficult didactic play. You might go in expecting Brecht. You get a clown show with a beating heart and a sucker punch. All the cultural references and gags have been updated and there’s space for ad-lib to keep it completely now. Most of the British cultural touch points are touched, from establishment politics to social media absurdities. They even mentioned Barbenheimer, which I only heard about yesterday – this crazy cinema marathon where people watch Barbie and Oppenheimer back to back (do it that way round if you are gonna try) and put it on the socials. “I must have liberty, withal as large a charter as the wind, to blow on whom I please, for so fools have.” This is admirable fooling. And all in the majestic confines of Theatre Royal Haymarket, “the queen mother’s favourite theatre” and we are told that since it is a royal theatre, “it is against the law to boo”. And even our matinee audience boos in response, even if the plausible law the maniac cites is probably apocryphal or invented by him for the gag. Danny excels at including the house, at giving audience permission to play but keeping us playing for him, for his character, for his story.
It’s running until 9th September and it’s a big theatre to fill so if you’re diligent you might well find cheap tickets. If you’ve never seen it, it’s a good one. And if you have, it’s been brought right up to date.
AlBarclay 