Theatre
Donmar Warehouse
February 27 2003
LATE in 1969 a bomb exploded in Milan, killing 16 people. The police blamed anarchists, and took one of them, Guiseppei Pinelli, to their headquarters, where he fell to his death from an upper window.
This event was passed off as a suicide or, weirdly, an “accident”, but nobody believed the explanations that anyway were undermined ten years later by the conviction of three fascists for the crime.
By then, Dario Fo’s didactic farce, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, was itself getting old. He’d staged it in 1970, giving its madcap ironies an immediacy that clearly cannot exist in Britain 2003.
However, that has not stopped its translator, Simon Nye, from making a strange choice. He could have kept the Italian date and setting, as Gavin Richards did when the play opened in Britain in 1979. Instead, Robert Delamere’s production begins with recorded babble from Blair and Thatcher, unfurls in an unnamed modern British city, and involves an unindentified anarchist.
Fact becomes fiction, depriving the play of authority and punch. It is now about everywhere and nowhere, especially nowhere. But at least we get the chance to sample what, despite the changes and an ending he is known to dislike, is quintessential Fo.
Into the police station comes a descendant of the clowns of the commedia dell’arte, a “maniac” who variously passes himself off as Spider-Man, a bishop, an ex-soldier with an artificial hand and leg, and, vitally, a judge reinvestigating the anarchist’s death.
All this gives Rhys Ifans every chance to tease cops who include a bluff Desmond Barrit, a mean Paul Ritter and a podgily awful Adrian Scarborough. The funny voices and silly walks pall at times, but the judge himself is a splendid creation. He is a tweedy blimp who looks and sounds unnervingly like Peter O’Toole, but still manages to trick the police into muddling their stories, exposing their contradictions and, in effect, damning themselves. Was the suspect so badly bullied he defenestrated himself? No, it was a friendly interrogation. Did he jump from sheer happiness, then? Well, maybe. But why was the window open in freezing December, how did a tiny man make the leap without help, and why, if a cop grabbed a shoe in a vain attempt to stop him falling, did his body end up with two on its feet? Was he a tripod or given to wearing shoes on top of shoes for cosmetic reasons? Wittily, Ifans’s “maniac” destroys the police case — only to veer off into an incoherent denunciation of capitalism, the class system, repressive tolerance, etc, etc, etc.
This means that an often amusing evening ends by adding clunkiness to irrelevance. Or maybe there is a British cop-shop where anarchists drop from windows.
Don’t know where it is, though.
