The Performance of Power and the Power of Performance: Rewriting the Police State in Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist

The Performance of Power and the Power of Performance: Rewriting the Police State in Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist JOYLYNN WING Italian playwright Dario Fo has been exploring the radical relationship between power, violence, and comedy for the past forty years. 1 In a wide variety ofplays and performance events which feature theatrical techniques culled from the fertile traditions of his homeland, Fo weaves comedy's ancient ploys into a complex production mode featuring a type ofgrotesque physical paradox which he calls "black mime," 2 in order to attack a power structure which he sees as immobile and static. In his popular 1970 piece, Accidelllal Death of an Anarchist, he appropriates the archetypical comic fool figure, as a "histriomaniac ,'" in order to attack the pretensions of the police state and naturalistic theatre simultaneously. In the course of the action, illusionistic theatre is equated with the believable cover-up, and the process of theatre itself becomes the farcial mechanism upon which the unidimensional, solid front of authority is shattered by the provisionality of its own plot line. Fo wrote Accidental Death ofan Anarchist' in 1970 as a type of informative "teatro a bruciare,'" intended to expose an officially sanctioned network of lies and cover-ups surrounding the police murder of a young railroad worker, Giuseppe Pinelli. After a bomb killed sixteen people in Milan in 1969, the police arrested Pinelli, who subsequently died in a fourth-floor "fall" from the window of the police station. In order to cover up responsibility for Pinelli's death and to divert attention from their own failure to investigate the possible perpetrators of the bombing, the police devised a story in which Pinelli supposedly committed suicide in remorse for his guilt over the bombings. Years later the authorities arrested several fascists, including a high official in the Italian secret police, and they were convicted of the bombings. In the meantime, however, official investigations of the event abounded, and the police officer implicated in Pinelli's death by the left wing newspaper, Lotta Continua, sued that publication for libel. The resulting enquiries and trials 140 JOYLYNN WING provided Fo with a wealth oftopical information ripe for satire. Fo describes his dramatic strategy in this playas "an exercise in counterinformation": Using authentic documents - and complete transcripts of the investigations carried out by the various judges as well as police reports - we turned the logic and the truth of the facts on head. But the great and provocative impact of this play was determined by its theatrical form: rooted in tragedy, the play became farce - the farce of power.6 Ifthe illusionistic text resembles the human ego in that it "thrives by repressing the process of its own making," as Terry Eagleton points out,7 then Fo's strategy in Anarchist is clearly a direct attack on the quasi-mystical unity of both. Fo crafts his "farce of power" as an assault on holistic illusionism by characterizing the performance text as fundamentally a mode of production which is therefore subject to the active intervention of its audience.8 In order to provoke the spectator's active collaboration in the theatrical process, Fo employs a variety of oppositional techniques which function to subvert or split audience perception. He then exploits that perceptual disjunction as a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt in which "the habitual mode of representation, where the public is kept at a distance, [is] completely subverted and the spectators completely implicated."9 Recurring oppositional techniques in Fo's theatrical arsenal include didactic introductions and interventions (discorsi) , ostensibly spontaneous byplay with the audience (interventi), grotesque exaggerations of slapstick conventions (tormentoni), blocking patterns in which a background . figure (usually the fool) "upstages" a power figure, corporeal distortions (or "disarticulations" of the actor's body), and conscious fragmentation of character and script alike. In AccidentalDeath ofanAnarchist, Fo crafts a sense ofaudience complicity from his first moments onstage. As in all ofhis productions, he frames the play with an apparently informal introduction. In fact, the prologue is every bit as orchestrated as the ostensibly more polished formal "script."w In this case, Fo contextualizes the play with a prologue about the previous "defenestration" of an American anarchist named Salseda: This play...