Like most of Dario Fo’s work, Accidental Death of an Anarchist is not a traditional play designed for a passive, uncritical audience to watch through a “fourth wall.” The actors repeatedly call one another by their real names, ask the audience questions, and criticize the playwright himself. Fo lets his actors adapt their jokes and political commentary to the time and place where they are performing. (For instance, this LitChart is based on the 1980 UK edition of the play, which adds commentary on the Watergate Scandal and Margaret Thatcher.) Fo doesn’t just do this for the sake of artistic innovation. Rather, he does so because it enables him to build his audience’s political consciousness and comment on theater’s power as a political tool.
Fo builds the audience’s consciousness less by sending them direct political messages than by forcing them to participate in and contemplate the play’s events. This shared experience helps audiences understand their collective political interests—indeed, Fo’s traveling theater company famously performed his work in small towns all around Italy, then held community debates and political meetings immediately after them. But Fo also emphasizes theater’s power by suggesting that politics is all an act. After all, the Maniac achieves his political goals above all through multiple layers of acting: at the beginning of the play, he impersonates a lunatic who impersonates a psychiatrist, and, later on, he impersonates a magistrate who impersonates a detective. Even when Feletti identifies the Maniac as a notorious activist at the end of the play, it’s unclear whether this is his real identity or just another act. And throughout the play, he attacks the policemen’s lies about the anarchist’s death through theater—he makes them reenact the interrogation, then he mocks all the changes and inconsistencies in their story. Even though the audience will never know what really happened during the anarchist’s investigation, Fo indicates, this should not stop them from understanding the real forces at play. Indeed, he suggests that the Italian political system is also based on a form of theater: politicians, bureaucrats, and judges are just acting when they address the public, so the public must look behind the scenes to understand where their real interests lie.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Theater, Truth, and Political Consciousness ThemeTracker
Theater, Truth, and Political Consciousness Quotes in Accidental Death of an Anarchist
BERTOZZO: (To Audience) Good evening. I am Inspector Francesco Giovanni Batista Giancarlo Bertozzo of the Security Police. This is my office on the first floor of our notorious headquarters here in Milan. Notorious following a sordid little incident a few weeks ago when an anarchist, under interrogation in a similar room a few floors above, fell through the window. Although my colleagues claimed quite reasonably, that the incident was suicide, the official verdict of the enquiry is that the death of the anarchist was “accidental.” Bit ambiguous you see. So there’s been public outrage, accusations, demonstrations and so on flying around this building for weeks. Not the best atmosphere in which a decent nine to five plainclothes policeman like myself can do an honest inconspicuous day’s work.
BERTOZZO: I ought to warn you that the author of this sick little play, Dario Fo, has the traditional, irrational hatred of the police common to all narrow-minded left-wingers and so I shall, no doubt, be the unwilling butt of endless anti-authoritarian jibes.
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: 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: I’ll throw myself out! How high are we? I will.
BERTOZZO: Bugger him! I’ll give him a hand.
CONSTABLE: This place has got a bad enough record as it is. We can’t afford another one.
BERTOZZO: You’re right, Constable.
CONSTABLE: I know I’m right.
MANIAC: And when I’m down there all sludgy on the pavement and doing the death rattle and be warned I shall take a long time to die and I’ll be rattling a lot—the journalists will be flocking round and I’ll tell them, rattling away, that you pushed me!! (He makes to jump)
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?
MANIAC: What imaginations! Is it any wonder with your incredible inventions battering him from all sides that the suspect is seized with the most enormous raptus and launches himself into space? I’ll be frank. You two are done for. You will be charged forthwith with instigating this man to commit suicide.
Both protest.
PISSANI: The second version.
CONSTABLE: What second version do you want?
SUPERINTENDENT: That one.
CONSTABLE: No. That’s the second first version.
PISSANI: Well where’s the first second version?
CONSTABLE: Here.
All three give file to MANIAC
ALL THREE: The second version!
MANIAC: So there has been a re-writing of events.
SUPERINTENDENT: A slight correction.
MANIAC: Yes?
SUPERINTENDENT: We corrected the time of the original interrogation in which we employed the…
MANIAC: The lies?
SUPERINTENDENT: … Er deception strategy. The session ended at eight instead of nearly midnight as previously stated.
MANIAC: You moved everything forward four hours.
PISSANI: Except the fall from the window. There were witnesses to that.
PISSANI: He’s right!
He climbs onto the window sill.
PISSANI: I can’t bear the disgrace! Famiglia, pardona me!
SUPERINTENDENT: No! No! No! There has to be another way!
MANIAC: Can’t you feel the raptus boiling up inside you?
PISSANI: Oh oh oooh.
Swaying there, about to jump.
MANIAC: One great liberating leap!
SUPERINTENDENT: (Suddenly) I’ve got it! Don’t panic! I’ve got it!
PISSANI: If I want to panic, I’ll panic! I’m going!
As he leaps the SUPERINTENDENT grabs him and pulls him back in.
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.
MANIAC: (Getting carried away. To audience) How many more Russian spies are downing port at Buckingham Palace? Why did the Anthony Blunt cover-up happen? Why? Because class runs thicker than nationhood or ideology. But who gives a TINKER’S about that—what the scandal-mongering press cares about Blunt is whether he is knocking off Guy Burgess.
SUPERINTENDENT: (Name of actor who is playing the part) This isn’t Dario Fo.
MANIAC: I know, but I love bit of political gossip. What about the bastard politicians and businessmen mixed-up in busting Rhodesian oil sanctions? We all know who they are. Are there any arrests? Not fucking likely. Meanwhile innocent black kids can’t walk the streets for fear of getting picked up on SUS charges.
PISSANI: This is unheard of distortion of the author’s meaning!
MANIAC: He’ll get his royalties. Who’s moaning?
PISSANI: Get back to the script!
SUPERINTENDENT: This is an insult to Dario Fo!
MANIAC: Oh Dio! Whichever way it goes, you see, you’ve got to decide. Goodnight.
