Dario Fo: Forever jester in The Accidental Death of an Anarchist

I first came across Nobel Prize-winning playwright Dario Fo during a conversation on Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright. I was deeply interested in Brecht those days and it was often bandied about that Fo drew major influences from the German playwright. Thus, I decided to read up Fo’s writings. To my delight, I found out that he was not only influenced by Brecht, but also several other intellectuals who I admired, including political theorist Antonio Gramsci, Anton Chekhov, Soviet poet, playwright, and actor Vladimir Mayakovsky, Molière, and George Bernard Shaw. Consequently, all the more reason to find out about the maverick playwright.

When I started reading Fo’s magnum opus The Accidental Death of an Anarchist, it surprised me with its dark humour. The play, which is about police brutality, corruption, and fallacy, continues to be relevant today, several decades after its penning. In fact, the play has achieved iconic status and the role of the main protagonist is still considered a dream role for actors. Based on the true incident of a suspected anarchist, who was accused of planting a bomb, the play exposes the deep-rooted corruption of those in power and the powerlessness of those at the bottom of the social ladder.

The play is set in a police building in Milan, where an anarchist has died a week before. The primary character, a manic, is being interrogated by the police. He confuses the policemen to the point where they don’t want to detain him anymore. He also fools them into enacting the scene of the death by impersonating a judge.

His incisive remarks leave the policemen scratching their heads and manages to expose the contradictions in the police story. He also involves a woman journalist who has been trying to investigate the events.

The play ends with two alternative endings, one with the journalist leaving the policemen to be bombed and in the second, the policemen leave her to die. The maniac then leaves the audience to decide which ending they prefer. The climax is particularly shocking and can take the audience by surprise as the maniac jumps out the window and detonates a bomb.

Throughout the play, Fo uses the alienation effect. Brecht used this term for a situation where the audience is prevented from identifying with the characters or getting completely immersed in the story.

His logic was the reverse of mainstream Stanislavskian approach of acting in which the audience is expected complete submerge itself in the character and the story. Fo achieves the effect by getting his actors to speak directly to the audience, thus removing the so-called invisible wall between actors and the audience and reiterating to the spectators that they were indeed watching a play. He breaks the spell again and again. As a farce, the play puts bawdy humour to great effect. Fo believed that laughter and humour allowed the audience to feel anger without giving it the opportunity to dissipate unlike a tragedy, where there is catharsis.

Fo himself described the play as "a grotesque farce about a tragic farce".

Written and produced in 1970, the play continues to enthrall the audience across the world. “Imagine a cross between Bertolt Brecht and Lenny Bruce and you may begin to have an idea of the scope of Fo’s anarchic art,” said Mel Gussow in 1983 in The New York Times.