Accidental Death of an Anarchistwas a succes de scandale when it was first put on in 1970. It takes place in a police station from the fourth floor of which an anarchist, under interrogation over a bombing in Milan, has recently fallen to his death. Enter a maniac with "actors' disease" who impersonates various establishment figures, mainly a judge who is to reopen an enquiry into the anarchist's death. There is method in the maniac's madness, and his questions reveal ludicrous inconsistencies in the policemen's accounts. The play was based on a real event: in the heady late sixties and early seventies, bombs were being let off by both Right and Left, and the Italian government, then exercising a 'strategy of tension' to distract from the unrest, may well have been in league with a rightwing group that carried out the Milan bombing. Dario Fo is propounding one of the few conspiracy theories which, unusually for such dietrologie, may actually hold water. The accused anarchist was probably a fall guy defenestrated. 
     Accidental Death was designed to alter from day to day so as to incorporate the latest occurrences in a 1970 libel trial being conducted against a leftwing daily that had tacitly accused the police of murder; despite the specificity of events and protagonists, it has since been used as an all-purpose agitprop play protesting against all sorts of real or imagined miscarriages of justice. Typically, in the present production there are references to the impending war. Unfortunately, however, 'It is the fate of rebels to found orthodoxies'. Accidental Death elicited police harrassment, bans and bomb threats thirty-two years ago. Now, five years after its author Dario Fo has received the Nobel Prize for Literature, it no longer baits the bourgeoisie but delights them. 'If people come to understand what's really going on, then we are in deep trouble' says the maniac in his guise of pro-establishment judge - this is no longer outrage but folk wisdom. We all believe in conspiracy theories now, even the Queen, and everyone holds forth authoritatively about police cover-ups and establishment plots. From today’s perspective, Fo is rather too comme il faut.
     Not only is it difficult for a contemporary director to make the play come across as outrageous, it is also hard to strike the right note or to carry out the play's purpose. Fo expressly asserted that he was using laughter as a political weapon, since, rather than relieving the audience, as the catharsis of horror or tears might do, 'laughter really does remain at the back of the mind among the ferocious dregs which cannot be scraped away', an irritant that will provoke revolutionary thought and action. As staged at the Donmar Warehouse, Accidental Death is often funny, but seems pointless - vieux jeu. It is neither horrifying nor farcical enough. Rhys Ifans is a brilliant mimic, and one often remarks a clever touch, but he doesn't enjoy himself enough really to transport the audience into hilarity. The production has an amateur feel and it doesn’t quite cohere; it is also often farcical in a clumsy, unintentional way, as with the ill-thought-out portrayal of a sexy journalist at the end. However, high points of acting stick out from the overall fabric: Paul Ritter as the grim, poker-faced Inspector (his Liverpudlian accent extraordinarily sinister), is excellent, as is Cornelius Booth as the Constable. Radiating benevolent yet cruel and conniving stupidity from his round face (the whole effect somehow accentuated by a cold sore), Booth acheived some fantastically uproarious moments and was the most truly Fo-friendly of the cast.
Jane O'Grady