Accidental Death of an Anarchist is full of characters whose personal and professional lives don’t quite align: the bumbling police officers, the righteous journalist Maria Feletti, and of course the multi-talented Maniac, who convincingly impersonates professionals from bishops and army captains to surgeons and High Court magistrates. Fo’s critique of labor is clearest of all in his police officers. Even though they spend their days torturing activists, the policemen are not right-wing fanatics—in fact, they don’t care about politics, just about pleasing their bosses and receiving their pensions. When the Maniac introduces himself as a judge, they exalt him; when he criticizes them, they cower out of fear, but not guilt. This is because they view themselves as bureaucrats who carry out orders, not free human beings whose actions have consequences and moral significance.
But if their jobs define them, the Maniac, a master impersonator, mocks the division of labor by defining his jobs. His impersonations succeed because he exploits a common assumption: it’s easy to think that powerful, trusted experts choose their positions out of a sense of moral duty and deserve those positions because they are talented, righteous, or wise. But if even a lunatic can pass himself off as one of them, then perhaps these people are actually just as ordinary and interchangeable as bureaucrats or factory workers. This is even true of Maria Feletti, the communist journalist who hopes that publishing the truth will fix Italy’s corruption. But the Maniac argues that, even if Feletti’s exposé might get a few corrupt officers fired, it will do nothing to change the system that corrupts them in the first place. In the Maniac’s view, Feletti’s job will always prevent her from actually living out her values because corporate interests own the media and ensure that, whenever “the people want truth,” the papers just “offer them scandal.” By mocking the way that people’s jobs come to define them, Dario Fo suggests that the modern capitalist economy robs people their freedom and humanity by forcing them to fill narrowly defined roles within a complex division of labor.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Labor, Identity, and Humanity ThemeTracker
Labor, Identity, and Humanity Quotes in Accidental Death of an Anarchist
MANIAC: Committed sixteen times, same thing every time—“Histrionic mania” from the Latin, histriones, “to act the part of”—my hobby, you see, the theatre; and my theatre is the theatre of reality so my fellow artistes must be real people, unaware that they are acting in my productions, which is handy, as you see, I’ve got no cash to pay them.
MANIAC: Ah ah. Strait-jacket or nothing. Article 122 of the Penal Code states, “Whoever in his capacity as a public official imposes non-clinical instruments of restraint upon a psychologically disturbed person in a manner liable to provoke a crisis in the disturbance shall incur charges punishable by five to fifteen years with forfeit of pension.”
CONSTABLE: Ah. (He backs off, terrified of losing his pension)
MANIAC: Who wants to be a barrister? I don’t want to be passive. I don’t want to defend. I’m like you, Inspector. I like to accuse, convict, judge and pass sentence.
BERTOZZO: Never actually impersonated a judge, have you? Just for the record?
MANIAC: Unfortunately the opportunity hasn’t arisen so far,
CONSTABLE: Shame.
MANIAC: Yes, but oh I’d love to do a judge. You see the thing about judges is that they never retire. That’s the beauty of it. Your ordinary humdrum sons and daughters of toil, they hit sixty and they’re finished, they slow down, get sloppy, sluggish, whoops onto the scrap heap—at that very same moment that your average magistrate blooms into a high court judge...
MANIAC: Let me stay
BERTOZZO: Out!
MANIAC: I can help you.
BERTOZZO: Throw yourself down the stairs you fruitcake!
MANIAC: No need to be so rough.
MANIAC struggles to gain possession of his plastic carrier bags lying in a heap by his chair
BERTOZZO: Put your fucking head under a bus.
MANIAC: I can help you make subversives talk.
BERTOZZO: Slash your wrists.
MANIAC: I can injure without visible signs.
BERTOZZO: Do what you like! I don’t care!
MANIAC: I know how to make nitroglycerine suppositories!
BERTOZZO: OUT!!
MANIAC: Nobody move. Justice has arrived.
He empties files out of the window.
MANIAC: You’re free, free, absolutely free! Not so free.
He opens top drawer of filing cabinet and looks through.
MANIAC: Oooh I see, the big fish. Pesci grossi! Diamond smugglers, drug racketeers. You can all stay there. Where are all the little people? I know.
Closes top drawer and opens bottom drawer. Looks through.
MANIAC: That’s more like it. Heads!
Takes an armful of files and empties them out of the window
(Blows-a huge raspberry down the phone) That was Bertozzo blowing you a raspberry, He says you can both rot for all he cares, you’ve stood in his way long enough, about time you were re-posted or pensioned off … Where? … Where? … South, probably, some flea-infested station in the arsehole of the world where the bandits use the fuzz for target practice when the melons are out of season … Ha ha OK, I’ll tell him. (Phone away) … He says he’s going to push our faces in at the earliest opportunity ha ha … (To phone) You and whose army … ? (Raspberry) Heil Himmler!!
MANIAC: (To CONSTABLE again) You got a brother who works here?
CONSTABLE: No.
MANIAC: (to STAGE MANAGER) Remind me not to appear in these cheap touring productions again. Can’t even afford a decent-sized cast.
VOICE OFF: Sorry (name of actor) …
PISSANI: For Christ’s sake. Do you mind?
MANIAC: Sorry, it’s the touring.
PISSANI: The greasy breakfasts!
MANIAC: The nylon sheets. Where were we?
SUPERINTENDENT: Who is this dribbling cretin?
PISSANI: Professor Marco Maria Malipiero!
SUPERINTENDENT: What!
PISSANI: First Councillor to the High Court!
SUPERINTENDENT: What!
PISSANI: His honour, the judge is here to conduct the new enquiry…
SUPERINTENDENT: (To PISSANI) Why didn’t you warn me. (To MANIAC) We were expecting you, your Honour, but not so soon.
MANIAC: Besides being evident garbage your stories lack the tiniest vestige of humanity. No warmth. No laughter. No pain. No remorse. SING! (Guitars) For God’s sake. Show a human heart beating beyond the sordid tangle of lies you have left in your wake. Before it is too late, give the public something to believe in. SING! (Cast begin to sing) Sing and they may forgive the superficial facts. Three tortured human souls, albeit they are policemen, singing their suspect’s song with him to cheer him through his darkest hour. The song of anarchy itself. “Our homeland is the whole world. Our law is liberty. We have but one thought, revolution in our hearts.”
MANIAC suddenly turns on them.
MANIAC: This explains why so many perfectly ordinary, bored people suddenly dress themselves up as anarchists and revolutionaries—they are completely innocent, they just want to get themselves arrested so they can have a fucking good laugh for once in their lives. Our cunning anarchist is obviously in his grave right now, pissing himself!
Pause. The irony has got through.
PISSANI: I was just scaring him. You are the nutter!
SUPERINTENDENT: I’m a nutter!?
CONSTABLE: Please.
PISSANI: Well you bloody pushed him, chum!
SUPERINTENDENT: Did I? Did I? That is a laugh alright! All on my own, was I!
Suddenly all three realise at the same instant that the MANIAC is listening. They freeze. Slowly turn. The MANIAC has a beatific smile. Pause. No one speaks.
The MANIAC is outrageously costumed. He wears false moustache, glasses, wild wig, wooden leg, false hand, eye patch, carries a crutch.
MANIAC: Delighted!
He proffers his false hand.
MANIAC: Pardon my stiff hand. It’s wooden. Memento of the Algerian campaign. Nasty business. We don’t talk about it.
They stare at his wooden leg. He gives it a slap.
MANIAC: Vietnam. Green Berets. All past history. Do sit down.
Slowly they all sit.
MANIAC: (To Audience) No cigarettes please. All dry wood here. Right, young woman, don’t mind me. I’ll just park my old timbers over here and you get stuck in. What’s the subject?
FELETTI: Window straddling.
MANIAC: (He sits awkwardly) Splendid.
MANIAC: You are a journalist Miss Feletti, so you want to use your pen to lance the public boil, but what will you achieve? A huge scandal, a heap of big nobs compromised head of the police force shunted off into retirement.
FELETTI: Not a bad day’s work.
MANIAC: It’s just another chance for the pristine beauticians of the Communist Party to point out another wart on the body politic and pose themselves as the party of honesty But the STATE, Miss Feletti, the State remains, still presenting corruption as the exception to the rule, when the system the State was designed to protect is corruption itself. Corruption is the rule.
