Accidental Death of an Anarchist
by Dario Fo
Summary
A man calling himself only the Maniac talks his way into a Milan police station by claiming, falsely and repeatedly, to be whatever official the moment requires, first a psychiatrist, then a judge named Marco Malipiero, then a forensic expert named Captain Piccini. Using each disguise, he gets the officers investigating the death of a detained anarchist to walk him back through their own contradictory story of how the man came to fall from a fourth floor window during interrogation. Dario Fo builds the whole play as farce rather than tragedy, and the comedy is the mechanism: every absurd voice and prop the Maniac uses gets the police to say out loud, for laughs, the same lies they have already told a real magistrate with a straight face.
A journalist named Maria Feletti arrives partway through to investigate the case herself, and the play offers two different endings depending on the production, since Fo wrote it that way on purpose. In one, she leaves the corrupt officers to die in a bomb the Maniac has planted rather than expose them through the proper channels. In the other, she chooses to save them out of a stated commitment to the rule of law, and the officers respond by chaining her to a window the moment they realize how much she actually knows. Fo leaves the audience to decide which ending fits the story better, a device that keeps the play's anger active rather than settled into a single verdict.
The play is based directly on the real 1969 death of Giuseppe Pinelli, an anarchist who fell from a Milan police station window during questioning over the Piazza Fontana bombing, and the laughter never lets a reader forget that a real man died the way this farce keeps re enacting. It suits a reader who wants political theater that argues through absurdity rather than solemnity, and it rewards anyone willing to find a case this serious genuinely funny without ever forgetting why the joke exists.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Dario Fo the 1997 Nobel Prize in Literature for work that emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden. Accidental Death of an Anarchist, first staged on 5 December 1970 at the Capannone di Via Colletta in Milan, is the play most closely tied to that citation, written the year after Pinelli's death while the case was still an open wound in Italian public life. The Roman Catholic Church criticized the 1997 award, continuing a censure of Fo's work that had followed him for decades.
Fo and his wife, the actress Franca Rame, spent much of their careers performing for factory floors and community halls rather than commercial theaters, a choice inseparable from the play's own contempt for official power; Rame herself was abducted and assaulted by fascists in 1973. The semiotician Umberto Eco praised Fo's own sequel to the play in his column for L'Espresso, and a 1979 London production, adapted by Gavin Richards, earned Richards an Olivier Award nomination for the lead role.